I have a piece up on FoxNews.com about why the federal budget “crisis” is largely a hoax manufactured by those who have sought all along to destroy government and undermine poor and working families.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/06/federal-budget-crisis-hoax/
Here’s an excerpt:
“Yes, our level of national debt is in the long-term untenable. And yes, the fact that large swaths of that debt is owned by China and Saudi Arabia is deeply problematic. The solution, however, is to use government spending on innovation and new industries not only to kick start a private sector that has been reluctant to create jobs but also retool the American economy so we actually make things again and have a broad middle class with good wages and benefits who can afford to buy the stuff we make, creating the kind of demand we need for long-term sustainability. But Wall Street and big business lobbyists don’t want you to own your own business, make a good salary and have a nice house with a reasonable mortgage. How would they make money on that?”
Read the whole thing and give it some love using the Facebook and Twitter links at the top of the page
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/06/federal-budget-crisis-hoax/
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One Response to Shutdown Analysis: The Federal Budget Crisis Hoax [FoxNews.com]
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Wow, I love what you wrote from a political and philosophical standpoint. The Corporate thieves who heisted all that “bailout” money from TARP should not be rewarded by handing them the keys to Social Security or our health care programs but, at some point we’re going to have to stop raising the debt limit and balance the budget. It should be obvious how we can reduce the long term deficit to balance the budget.
Comparing our current economic state to post WWII is problematic. The prosperity of the 1950s has to take into account that we literally destroyed major components of international competition in the manufacturing sector (Japan and Germany). Then, after destroying them, we sold them what we made in their absence. Today the economic conditions are simply not the same. We have to expect China and India will continue to grow. Not only because that is the trend but because it is morally wrong to prevent their massive populations from sharing in the prosperity of the modern world.
Certainly we should maintain providing services to Americans in need. Otherwise what is the government even for? I like the Concord Coalitions assessment of the Presidents and the House’s budget proposals. Although I’d like to see the elimination of entitlements along the lines of the House budget but without a reduction in tax rates. That would allow us to maintain a spending level that is comparable to our current spending level. Even if we do broaden the tax base and maintain the tax rate in the long term we have to face the problem of deficit reduction.
We have to face the fact that we, Americans, are warmongers. We have to stop killing everybody else just because we can. We should stop murdering foreigners as our principle tactic of foreign policy. Besides It being an important ethical issue for us as Americans to look at defense spending, we need to analyze the size of our military budget in the context of a reasonable budget for an America at peace.
Certainly at some point we’ll want to return to pre-war (WWII I mean) levels of defense spending. Maybe not for a hundred years but at some point, right? Or are we going to be the world police forever? Because if we are we’d better start broadening our tax base by making other counties pay for our protection or we’ll never be out of debt and we’ll always be at war.