Why isn’t our economy working? Because too many people have drunk the Cool Aide of lies and half-truths that have been laid down by the demagogues of the Right. The real truth is that;
Tax cuts for the rich do not trickle down to anyone else. They turn into diamonds and yachts for the rich.
Higher taxes on the rich will not hurt the economy. From WWII to 1981 the rich paid taxes as high as 91% and the economy grew much faster than it has since then.
Shrinking government doesn’t generate more jobs. It just means that the people who were working for the government are now out of work.
Cutting the deficit now is not more important than boosting the economy because if we don’t boost the economy there won’t be anyone paying taxes to reduce the deficit.
Medicare and Medicaid are not major drivers of the budget deficit. Spending for them is rising but if can be curtailed if the government uses the bargaining power of these huge programs to drive down costs at drug companies and hospitals, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. Also, since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private insurers we should make it available to everyone on a fee basis.
Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, it is a sound financial investment that is solvent for the next 26 years and will become solvent forever if the government will stop illegally using its funds for other projects.
It isn’t unfair that lower income Americans don’t pay income taxes because they already pay a larger percentage of their income than do the rich, in payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, user fees and tolls.
*********
Right now in America we are faced with the fact that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in low interest, loans to every major financial institution in this country, foreign banks, multi-national corporations and some of the wealthier people in the world. When Wall Street was in danger the Fed acted boldly and with a sense of urgency to save the financial system from collapse. Now that the middle class is collapsing and 46 million people in this country are below the poverty line the Fed has failed to act with the same urgency so that small business and start ups can get the loans needed to put some of the millions currently unemployed back to work or prevent others from losing their homes.
Wall Street is back making huge profits and paying outlandish bonuses and taking the same risks that put the country in a hole in the first place.
********
Republicans in the House have long been known for their inflexible opposition to tax hikes, government spending and financial regulation. Though most Republican’s have never been overly friendly to the environment, the current group is setting a new low for environmental concern. Their lack of control of the Senate is the only thing that has blocked their ability to trash the environment completely. Their reason for this brain dead stance; regulations cost money and jobs. That’s true, they do, but only if you don’t use the environmental problems to create new jobs that haven’t previously existed.
But let’s start with the Republican premise. Environmental regulations cost money and jobs. This is true as far as they have taken it, but what about the cost of non-regulation? Well, there’s always the chance that the planet could just burn up and then we wouldn’t have anything to worry about, but let’s not go that far because first we have to deal with the problem of the Right, thinking that God not science is what makes the world go around. I will, only for the sake of argument, accept the premise that God created the earth but then we have to deal with what has happened since creation and we really need science to explain that.
If you don’t believe that last sentence then you’re too dumb to be in this conversation. Shocked? Yeah, I understand that, that kind of confrontation never leads to a solution so let’s just say that practical experience has already shown us that for some reason the climate is changing, that the ice caps are melting, that we are experiencing more droughts, floods, hurricanes and tsunamis than ever before and in a seriously concentrated time frame. So maybe, just maybe, the way we are treating our environment has something to do with it, and if this is true, then it is costing us more money to ignore it than it would to regulate ourselves into compliance with nature.
But nothing in the world stands alone. Everything effects everything else so we have to look at the medical consequences and costs of non-compliance by environmental polluters. Every year, in the United States alone, coal and oil emissions each kill more people than all the radiation emitted at Chernoble from the time of the meltdown until now. Think about that. What a horrible toll to pay so the coal and oil billionaires can own bigger yachts, so a few more men can die in coal mines, so we can destroy another piece of our oceans with another Exon Valdiz. The fiscal cost of these failures in regulation, so dwarf the money that said regulation would cost in the form of job loss or lower company profits that the numbers are just off the scale. The cost of regulation is so small in comparison to the cost of the results of abuses perpetrated by a lack of regulation that they do not even belong in the same conversation.
If we are to get our financial house in order, the environment must be high on our list of considerations because the financial ramifications of not taking care of the environment are just too huge to be overcome. And for the God mongers who don’t believe in science, all you have to do is look out the window. That big wave heading toward your house in Kansas; it doesn’t belong there..
*****
The Republicans keep attempting to reduce the deficit, even at the cost of jobs and the rest of the economy, which strikes me as bizarre. They are, after all, the ones who put us in this dumpster of debt, unemployment and foreclosure. Now they scream at Obama, accusing him of spending wildly and getting nothing done. Let’s look at those accusations. As an old TV cop used to say, “Just the facts maam.”
Going into his presidency George Bush, the little one, had the first surplus on the annual deficit since Andrew Jackson, a gift from Bill Clinton and the Republican congress. In eight years he squandered that surplus, with, to be fair, some help from dumb Democrats, systematically destroying the strongest economy and largest budget surplus in our nation’s history.
He did it by starting two wars with no way to pay for them, reducing taxes, mostly on the rich instead of raising them to pay for the wars, passing a prescription drug bill with no way to pay for it (the first entitlement in US history without a revenue source) and forcing deregulation of the financial sector, thereby allowing them to gamble away America’s future.
Now, the people who supported Bush when he was putting in place the factors that would destroy our economy, men like Boehner, Cantor, Gingrich, McConnell, Sessions , Kyl and many more are trying to lay the blame for all of this on Obama. They have decided that rather than face up to the damage they have done and try to rebuild our country, they will roadblock any attempt to fix the economy with their only goal being the defeat of Obama in 2012.
For one party to want to defeat the other party’s president is not out of line. This has been the goal of out of office parties ever since we formed this country but the difference between the previous politicians and out current Republican party, is that the current bunch wants that occurrence more than it wants to help our struggling country. That’s wrong. That’s being unpatriotic. That’s being a traitor because they are putting their own political desires before the good of the country.
These men and their associates along with billionaires like the Koch brothers and their like are determined to take America away from the people and set up a banana republic where there are only very rich and very poor and where any intellectualism is anathema.
If this is the goal you aspire to, you should vote Republican in 2012. If you want even a chance to get a job and work for a living, have an opportunity to get ahead and raise a family in comfortable circumstances then you have to vote Democratic in 2012 and I don’t mean just for the president. You have to vote in every Democratic congressman up for election. Sure you’ll get a lot of bad ones, but the final result will be better for the country. The Republicans showed the kind of damage that can be done to our economy with just one chamber of congress under their control.
The men who are currently running the Republican Party have already shown you the kind of damage they can do to our economy and their current coven of clownish candidates have aptly demonstrated their inability to form coherent concepts. We have to stop them before they turn us into Haiti.