âSay what you need to say plainly and
then take responsibility for it.â -Ai Weiwei
Whatâs
Wrong Today:
Disinformation
has become the American way: Every conservative
or corporatist group has full time lobbyists working to protect its turf. From
the Koch
Brothers to the Heritage Foundation to Fox News.
In other words, you shouldnât believe
anything the Republicans or their fellow travelers say. They are all lobbying
organizations for the plutocracy and the Corporatocracy. They would pay your
mother to say good things about them. It is ever thus with the plutocrats and
the deficit scolds.
Consider
what Comstock Partners wrote:
Both
Wall Street and Washington have lost sight of the major cause of the deep
recession and exceedingly slow economic recovery. To hear all the talk, the
major concern is about the impending fiscal cliff and the federal budget
deficit. Fix the fiscal cliff and make major reductions in the deficit, they
say, and all will be ok. We think theyâve got it wrong.
Comstock says that the
major problem that cratered the economy was the credit crisis of 2008. That was
brought on by the housing boom, the explosion of household credit and the
associated sleazy practices by the mortgage banking industry. When the boom
collapsed, middle class households were left with a severely depleted asset
(their homes), record debt and low savings. Since then, they have been struggling
to get out of debt and increase their savings when their wage growth has been extremely
limited, a problem we seem incapable of solving.
The result is the
weak recovery that follows major credit crises.
More
from Comstock:
The federal
government deficit, far from being the
cause of the lackluster economy, was actually a result of it. In 2007, the
deficit was a manageable 1.7% of GDP. The non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) forecast deficits of between 0.7%
and 1.5% of GDP for the years 2008 through 2011 and surpluses for the seven
following years through 2018. What threw this forecast off track was the deep
recession, resulting in collapsing tax revenues, increased unemployment
insurance and various stimulative spending programs that wouldnât have happened
if not for the preceding housing and credit boom. (Emphasis
by the Wrongologist)
The
deficit is now mixed up with the fiscal cliff as the major problem holding back
the economy. The fiscal cliff is an
artificial problem manufactured in Washington during the debt limit
negotiations in the summer of 2011 that caused the loss of the U.S.
triple-A credit rating.
This is the disinformation machine at work: The Republicans
didnât win the national debate about how to deal with the economy, so the frame
was changed to the damage the Fiscal Cliff would cause. They then smuggle in plutocrat-friendly policies under the
pretense that they are simply sensible responses to the Cliff or to budget
deficit.
Here is Paul Krugman in the
NYT:
Consider the push
to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This
is only reasonable, weâre told â after all, life expectancy has risen, so
shouldnât we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely
regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income
Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase
in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have
to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security
and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans,
so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary
families than to the top 1 percent.
He goes on
to say:
OrâŚthe insistence
that any revenue increases should come from limiting deductions rather than
from higher tax ratesâŚthe math just doesnât work; there is, in fact, no way can
limits on deductions raise as much revenue from the wealthy as you can get
simply by letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. So any
proposal to avoid a rate increase is, whatever its proponents may say, a
proposal that we let the 1 percent off the hook and shift the burden, one way
or another, to the middle class or the poor.
The point
is that the class war by Republicans is still on, this time with extra
crispy deception added. This means that you should look very closely at any proposals
coming from the usual suspects especially if the proposal is being
represented as a bipartisan, common-sense solution (this
means you, Fix The Debt!).
The Hill reports that Dan Holler, communications director for
Heritage Action for America, a sister
organization of the Heritage Foundation, said about the Fiscal Cliff:
Republicans were reelected in the House to
stop Pres. Obama’s agenda, not figure out creative ways to fund it.
This is
the GOPâs problem: They don’t plan to work for the people of the United States;
they’re bought and paid for by plutocrats and corporatists.
Letâs
remember that the GOP excoriated the President for waging class warfare, while they adopted language pitting the
classes against each other: the 47%, makers vs. takers, job creators
vs. parasites.
The hypocrisy
would be astounding if not for the past 10 years of disinformation.
Now comes Mr.
Boehner, armed with an ideology that believes people choose to be poor. Boehnerâs
proposal will (1) rob seniors of important elements of safety-net programs, (2)
eliminate popular tax deductions for middle class families, (3) further
reduce revenues by reducing tax rates for the wealthy, while shifting a
larger tax burden onto middle and lower income households and
(4) Make Medicare even less progressive.
Boehner
says he is channeling Bowles-Simpson, but B-S started from a âbaselineâ that already assumed the end of the Bush
tax cuts.
Today,
Boehner and the deficit scolds want us to count the expiration of those cuts, which
were never affordable, as some kind of big giveback by the rich. Isnât.
Again
from Krugman:
It
needs to be said again: The plutocrats created the deficit in the first place.
It was their Republican president who spent trillions on wars that could not be
won… Whose policies of deregulation created the economic crash, burning
trillions of people’s hard earned money. Who cut the funds needed to maintain
public infrastructure, creating a burden for future generations. And now the
plutocrats pose as the voice of fiscal responsibility?! Of course only as long
as it is not at their own expense. Only as long as the poor and middle class
keep footing their bills. No more!
Whenever some
deficit-scold group talks about âshared sacrifice,â you should ask: Sacrifice
by whom and relative to what?
