The Democrats and Republicans are gong at each other tooth and nail, battling over raising the debt limit and using that fight to advance their agendas. The Democrats want to create employment and maintain as many of our social services as possible. The Republicans want to get Obama out of office. Hey! Don’t look at me. They’re the ones who said it. Or were they lying about that too?
There’s this huge battle going on about the debt limit and yet as I watched Face the Nation recently, three Governors including those of Wisconsin and Ohio and the Mayor of Los Angeles, all of whom had opinions on it seemed to have no idea that it was about what we had already spent and how to pay that debt. They all seemed to think that it was somehow about limiting spending in the future. How can people this brain dead get elected to office?
But before we all get locked into a state of high dudgeon, let’s take a cool look at the American economy and figure our where we really are. Unemployment is unacceptably high. Our infrastructure is failing. Our educational process ranks way down on the list of civilized nations and immigration, upon which this nation is built is being attacked by bigots and those, all but unemployable elements, to whom it promises competition.
But despite all this, America isn’t really in as bad shape as some would have us believe. It has one of the world’s most competitive economies with growing companies in most advanced industries. It has the greatest capital markets and the world’s greatest universities. It’s demographically vibrant thanks to the above mentioned immigration and it is the only rich country that will see its population grow over the next 25 years, again due partly to immigration.
We could have a liquidity problem, especially if the banks continue to hoard their money and we will have difficulty financing our debts and deficits if the world’s markets lose faith in our ability to make them good, which they will if we do not raise the debt limit.
Right now the world is lending to America more cheaply than ever before, simply because we are the economy that they believe in, the one they think can withstand whatever is thrown at it. To endanger this high credit rating by defaulting on the debt would cause interest payments to rise, making it much more expensive to acquire money and that would in turn really skyrocket our debt.
America has many ways to solve the deficit problem. The simplest is to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire returning to where we were, tax wise, during the Clinton administration when employment soared, as 25 million jobs were added. If this happened now it would add $3.9 trillion in revenues in the next decade.
That’s the simplest way. There is also the Simpson-Bowles way, a kind of catch as catch can, grab a little here and a little there approach to budgeting. It has some stuff that would work very well like cutting farm subsidies and getting into the tax code but it also has a lot of silliness like not recognizing that Social Security really has nothing to do with budgeting.
What it all comes down to once again is deciding what kind of country do you want to live in and voting for people who see things the same way as you do.
What do I mean by that? We are the lowest taxed civilized nation in the world. For that we get to live in one of the best countries in the world, despite some criminal mismanagement by the Bush administration. Yes criminal! When you start two wars, and at the same time lower the taxes that will pay for them just to appease your rich friends and a few votes, you are either completely brain dead or criminally incompetent. Then when your supporters try to cover up your inadequacies by blaming the next president for not keeping down expenses the whole problem has been magnified.
So do we want to live in a civilized country where we take care of the sick and elderly, where we educate our children, where we travel on safe highways and across safe bridges, where we have adequate broadband and other communication facilities that will be able to compete with the rest of the world in the next hundred years or do you want to live in Somalia because Somalia is what the Republicans are promising us. Of course it will be without our black citizens because we all saw the signs at the Tea Party rallies.
Civilization has its costs. Good medicine costs money. So does good education and yes I agree neither is, right now, up to snuff. But that doesn’t mean you dump them. You only do that if you haven’t the mental capacity to fix them and many of us do. Right now the problem with most programs being attacked by the right isn’t that they are unnecessary, it’s that they are being incompetently run. So the answer is to fix them not to eliminate them. That’s what the right doesn’t want to understand.