In These Times: Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

[marmar]

Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!
By Susan J. Douglas



I have a proposal for the next Democratic debate—hell, the next Democratic and Republican debates: Get rid of the TV personalities and have Paul Krugman moderate the thing.

That way, “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert won’t be asking Rep. Dennis Kucinich if he’s really seen a UFO, or Sen. Barack Obama if he believes in E.T.s. And NBC anchor Brian Williams won’t be asking Obama what he plans to be for Halloween. (And why is that what he asked the black guy?)

All Krugman would have to do is ask questions based on his important new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, which unabashedly calls for a new New Deal and for “expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality.” He argues that the central danger confronting us is the ongoing transfer of wealth to the very rich, which has led to massive economic and political inequality.

This has been the determined and successful agenda of the neocon movement. But with all their “free market” mumbo jumbo, neoconservatives make the rise of the super-rich seem inevitable. If hedge fund managers and Wall Street traders making anywhere from $50 million to $1.5 billion a year is simply the natural order of things, then what can the rest of us do but be fatalistic? Well, Krugman is here to lay out what should be the Democratic platform.

First, tax these bloodsuckers. Why does anyone need $50 million a year? What do you do with it—buy five houses in Aspen like Enron’s Ken Lay did? Krugman provides a historical overview of the role that taxes played in reversing the Gilded Age’s concentration of wealth among the super rich from the 1930s through the ’70s. But the Reagan and Dubya tax cuts “delivered disproportionately large benefits to upper-income households.” Clinton raised taxes on the rich, but the economy—and the rich—did just fine in the ’90s. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3415/tax_and_spend_hell_yeah/

[madinmaryland]

1. Thom Hartmann would be an interesting moderator also. nt

[pansypoo53219]

2. how about ANY teevee

gnews head. the debates have devolved into nothing but crap. how about a JUST a radio debate. no visual.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yup! "Fiscal conservatism" for the poor. Wild theft, piracy and welfare for the rich!

I heard an interview on C-span of "Blue Dog" Democrats just after the '06 election, and what they basically said was they want to cut everything in the budget except war spending. Fiscal responsibility. Balanced budget. Hooey!

Fuckers.

You don't jumpstart an economy that has been slaughtered by corporate welfare, multiple tax cuts for the rich, and outright grand theft--as well as unjust, heinous war--and help the poor recover, and create conditions for prosperity, by TIGHTENING the belt. You just don't. It is bogus. It sounds good, but what it really means is that this big party for the wealthiest people on earth is going to be paid for by the poorest Americans and the middle class. The poor and the middle class of other countries have already paid these kinds of debts that enrich the rich--our own and theirs--with vast impoverishment and neglect, the ruination of economies, and the crippling of services and social programs that are essential to creating prosperity--education, loans/grants to small business, land reform. And they are rebelling. That is what the Bolivarian Revolution in South America is about--and the rich should be grateful that it is a peaceful, democratic revolution, and that the lot of them haven't been guillotined, considering what they've done in cahoots with global corporate predators, the Bush Junta, the World Bank and rightwing paramilitaries.

But to get back to us. Now WE are a "Banana Republic." Make no mistake. The purpose was to loot us--and to shut us up forever as a peace-loving, justice-loving, progressive force in the world. And the Democratic enablers of this program--for instance, the people like Christopher Dodd and Terry McAuliffe, who engineered the fast-tracking of "trade secret," proprietary voting machines, with the "trade secrets" owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations; and even people like Nancy Pelosi, who endorsed the "Blue Dogs" (and took impeachment "off the table")--are the current enemies of the people, who, together with our new emperor, Hillary Clinton, are going to make us pay the cost.

Instead of cutting the military budget by 90%, down to a true defensive posture (no more wars of choice!). Instead of going after these thieves and mass murderers, and getting some of our money back. Instead of a major overhaul of the tax system to undo gross Reaganite unfairness to the poor, and favors to the rich. Instead of dismantling the worst actors among the global corporate predators who are destroying us (and the planet)--pulling their corporate charters and seizing their assets for the common good. Instead of ending the phony, destructive, failed "war on drugs" and the police state that has grown up around it. Instead of busting corporate monopolies, and establishing REAL "free trade"--with a lot of small competitive businesses. Instead of insuring a living wage, health care and retirement for all American workers, and protecting the poor from the monsters of the so-called health care industry and the bank credit card usury scam.

The money is there. It's just in the wrong hands, used for the wrong purposes, and concentrated among the ungodly rich.

The way to repair this economy, and this country, is to TRANSFER some that wealth BACK INTO the hands of the people who create wealth: the workers and the middle class. One of the most interesting facts I've ever heard is that it is small business that creates most of the jobs in this country. Yet our government lets gigantic corporations drive them out of business, or gobble them up in megacorps that don't give a damn about anybody. Small business also supports their local communities, way, way out of proportion to their size and income. Small is good. Big is bad. Government should intervene on behalf of the small.

That's what democratic government is FOR--to intervene, to negotiate, to advocate for the majority, against wealth and privilege. To balance things out. When has our government done THAT in the last 25 years?

The fascists call the program I have in mind "spending." But what it really is is BALANCING. And common sense. Build a middle class, and the wealth will come. Kill the middle class, and the wealth will never materialize, or it will go elsewhere, as we are seeing today with the off-shoring of millions OF jobs--to China and other cheap labor markets. Yet another problem created by the filthy rich--the treasonous exportation of jobs and manufacturing, in a piratical hunt for the cheapest, most unprotected labor, and the least environmental protection. Why aren't these traitor corporations PUNISHED for this--even banned from our shores?

There never was a more prosperous U.S. economy than when the government was taking fair portions of the wealth of the rich and pouring it into the common good--in the form of FREE UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONS for all qualified students (yup, U.C. and other systems were once FREE), in the form of generous G.I. loans for homes and education, in the form of building schools, libraries, hospitals, roads, bridges, ports, and rural electrification and telephone systems (which big business wouldn't fund), in the form of subsidized public transportation (subways, trains), the nearly FREE postal service with letter carriers to every home and hovel (linking us all together), the coast guard, the creation of numerous small and large parks and wild areas for FREE public use, the protection of the California coastline from overdevelopment and privatization, community policing, Headstart (early education for poor kids), strong environmental laws (which require well-paid, well-educated GOVERNMENT employees to enforce), strong regulation of savings and loan institutions (the protectors of small savers), and hundreds of other government SPENDING programs.

I'm talking about the 1950s to the mid-1970s, inspired by the "New Deal" and its visionary programs, such as Social Security. If Big Business won't guarantee a pension to the people who create its wealth, and if it treats loyal, productive workers like an expendable resource, then the people, acting together through their government, must act in lieu of the common decency of the robber barons, and create their own pension system. Because a society with homeless, starving elderly is a shit society not worth living in. Similarly, a society in which only the rich can go to college, or in which the rich gobble up all the land, and there is not even a park to sit in--no common public areas--or in which business corporations can poison air, water and land, with impunity--is a shitty, derelict, evil society, based on greed and "dog eat dog."

You want to go see what kind of a shit society these global corporate predators want to see us living in. Go to Caracas or Buenos Aires and see the shanytowns that slide off the hills with every heavy rain, or the millions of dirt poor street kids who don't know where their next meal is coming from. The U.S. corporate ethic writ large. And then you won't wonder why Hugo Chavez is a hero--a poor kid who grew up to be president, and is now building...schools, medical centers, universities, roads, bridges, pipelines, and pouring the country's oil profits also into free education through university, subsidies for adult retraining programs, loans/grants to small business, land reform (to keep small peasant plots in food production), medical centers and baseball parks in poor areas never before served by government, free classical music education for thousands of the poorest street kids (their orchestra has been playing to rave reviews around the world), and other bootstrapping projects.

A society that does not pour its wealth into its people is a society that is going to fail--no matter how rich a few people become, by ripping off everybody else. It will become unlivable. It will descend into bloody revolution or other kinds of chaos. And that is what we are looking at, here, if we cannot restore our democracy and initiate bold "SPENDING" programs to balance wealth and to invest in ourselves, once again--this time with a couple of constitutional amendments denying civil rights to business corporations, and limiting their size and global reach, so that this never happens again.