Benjamin Franklin, a rock star of his generation, said, when signing the Declaration of Independence, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Our founding fathers and the colonies, united, defeated a great and mighty empire.
Throughout our brief yet notable history, the cities of our nation were known for the dog-eat-dog way that fellow citizens treated their neighbors, eschewing the cornerstone of religious faith, all the while claiming to be part of the most upright of Christian nations. But, outside the cities (or so I would like to think), neighbors helped each other and generations of families lived together, all working to keep everyone afloat. Maybe it is the romantic myth of the heartland. But, I am buying it, lock, stock and barrel.
Today, we live in a society where people are more worried about their morning lattes than they are about ending our two wars, reducing our crushing debt and the stopping all politicking, all of which threaten to bankrupt out nation.
There is no silver bullet cure for our woes.
I heard today that people say that the Congress should not have saved the 300,000 teacher and firefighter jobs because their unions are too strong and teachers earn too much for doing too little. Ok, so, make the unions feel some pain, but does that justify keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? The illogic is frightening and delusional.
So the great experiment started in 1776 is rounding the drain because of greed and me-first-middle-and-last mind think.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I will forgo my Bush tax cut that I never wanted and didn’t need to pay for health care and to start reducing the deficit.
How about this: we make giving up the tax cuts voluntary. Just like the optional $1.00 gift to Wildlife Preservation (or is it public campaign finance?) on our tax forms. Just put a line item on the 2010 tax return that says, “This is how much more you would pay if the Bush tax cuts lapsed. Do you want to pay this amount (a) to reduce the deficit, (b) to pay for health care for the uninsured or (c) 50% to each?” and publish the list of people who contribute to these funds.
Maybe neighbors will embarrass neighbors into paying the money (because if you’re not on the list, either you’re selfish or you don’t make enough) or we have a pledge drive and use positive peer pressure.
Either way, Mr. President, I am with you for letting lapse the tax cut I never wanted and our nation couldn’t afford.
by Paul B. Farrell Market Watch
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Commentary: How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts. Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline
“How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.”
Get it? Not “destroying.” The GOP has already “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.”
Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats’ Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider — someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology — says about America, helps all of us better understand how America’s toxic partisan-politics “holy war” is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.
But why focus on Stockman’s message? It’s already lost in the 24/7 news cycle. Why? We need some introspection. Ask yourself: How did the great nation of America lose its moral compass and drift so far off course, to where our very survival is threatened?
We’ve arrived at a historic turning point as a nation that no longer needs outside enemies to destroy us, we are committing suicide. Democracy. Capitalism. The American dream. All dying. Why? Because of the economic decisions of the GOP the past 40 years, says this leading Reagan Republican.
Please listen with an open mind, no matter your party affiliation: This makes for a powerful history lesson, because it exposes how both parties are responsible for destroying the U.S. economy. Listen closely:
Reagan Republican: the GOP should file for bankruptcy
Stockman rushes into the ring swinging like a boxer: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt … will soon reach $18 trillion.” It screams “out for austerity and sacrifice.” But instead, the GOP insists “that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.”
In the past 40 years Republican ideology has gone from solid principles to hype and slogans. Stockman says: “Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses too.”
No more. Today there’s a “new catechism” that’s “little more than money printing and deficit finance, vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes” making a mockery of GOP ideals. Worse, it has resulted in “serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.” Yes, GOP ideals backfired, crippling our economy.
Stockman’s indictment warns that the Republican party’s “new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one:”
Richard Nixon’s gold policies get Stockman’s first assault, for defaulting “on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world.” So for the past 40 years, America’s been living “beyond our means as a nation” on “borrowed prosperity on an epic scale … an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves.”
Remember Friedman: “Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.” Friedman was wrong by trillions. And unfortunately “once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.”
And without discipline America was also encouraging “global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve.” Yes, the road to the coming apocalypse began with a Republican president listening to a misguided Nobel economist’s advice.
Stage 2. Crushing debts from domestic excesses, war mongering
Stockman says “the second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40% of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970.” Who’s to blame? Not big-spending Dems, says Stockman, but “from the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”
Back “in 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts,” but Stockman makes clear, they had to be “matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.”
OK, stop a minute. As you absorb Stockman’s indictment of how his Republican party has “destroyed the U.S. economy,” you’re probably asking yourself why anyone should believe a traitor to the Reagan legacy. I believe party affiliation is irrelevant here. This is a crucial subject that must be explored because it further exposes a dangerous historical trend where politics is so partisan it’s having huge negative consequences.
Yes, the GOP does have a welfare-warfare state: Stockman says “the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending, exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.”
When Fed chief Paul Volcker “crushed inflation” in the ’80s we got a “solid economic rebound.” But then “the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.” By 2009, they “reduced federal revenues to 15% of gross domestic product,” lowest since the 1940s. Still today they’re irrationally demanding an extension of those “unaffordable Bush tax cuts [that] would amount to a bankruptcy filing.”
Recently Bush made matters far worse by “rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures.” Bush also gave in “on domestic spending cuts, signing into law $420 billion in nondefense appropriations, a 65% percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy.” Takes two to tango.
Stockman continues pounding away: “The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector.” He warns that “Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation.” Wrong, not oblivious. Self-interested Republican loyalists like Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner knew exactly what they were doing.
They wanted the economy, markets and the government to be under the absolute control of Wall Street’s too-greedy-to-fail banks. They conned Congress and the Fed into bailing out an estimated $23.7 trillion debt. Worse, they have since destroyed meaningful financial reforms. So Wall Street is now back to business as usual blowing another bigger bubble/bust cycle that will culminate in the coming “American Apocalypse.”
Stockman refers to Wall Street’s surviving banks as “wards of the state.” Wrong, the opposite is true. Wall Street now controls Washington, and its “unproductive” trading is “extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives.” Wall Street banks like Goldman were virtually bankrupt, would have never survived without government-guaranteed deposits and “virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.”
Stage 4. New American Revolution class warfare coming soon
Finally, thanks to Republican policies that let us “live beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore,” while at home “high-value jobs in goods production … trade, transportation, information technology and the professions shrunk by 12% to 68 million from 77 million.”
As the apocalypse draws near, Stockman sees a class-rebellion, a new revolution, a war against greed and the wealthy. Soon. The trigger will be the growing gap between economic classes: No wonder “that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1% of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90% — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.”
Get it? The decaying fruit of the GOP’s bad economic policies is destroying our economy.
Warning: This black swan won’t be pretty, will shock, soon
His bottom line: “The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing … it’s a pity that the modern Republican party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.”
Wrong: There are far bigger things to “pity.”
First, that most Americans, 300 million, are helpless, will do nothing, sit in the bleachers passively watching this deadly partisan game like it’s just another TV reality show.
Second, that, unfortunately, politicians are so deep-in-the-pockets of the Wall Street conspiracy that controls Washington they are helpless and blind.
And third, there’s a depressing sense that Stockman will be dismissed as a traitor, his message lost in the 24/7 news cycle … until the final apocalyptic event, an unpredictable black swan triggers another, bigger global meltdown, followed by a long Great Depression II and a historic class war.
So be prepared, it will hit soon, when you least expect.
Let’s start with those who are afflicted with criminalstupidity or arrogance. Like the guy whose wedding pictures are on Facebook. Except that his wifewasn’t the bride. (see below the jump.)
So, this guy who was born here and pushes our civilization further down the drain (can you hear the flushing noises) is a citizen of the United States of America as a “birthright“.
By MEGHAN BARR, Associated Press Writer Meghan Barr, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 43 mins ago
CLEVELAND – Dread of the unknown hung in the air as Lynn France typed two words into the search box on Facebook: the name of the woman with whom she believed her husband was having an affair.
Click. And there it was, the stuff of nightmares for any spouse, cuckolded or not. Wedding photos. At Walt Disney World, no less, featuring her husband literally dressed as Prince Charming. His new wife, a pretty blonde, was a glowing Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by footmen.
“I was numb with shock, to tell you the truth,” says France, an occupational therapist from Westlake, a Cleveland suburb. “There was like an album of 200 pictures on there. Their whole wedding.”
The husband claimed Thursday that his marriage to Lynn France was never valid. He said she knew earlier about the other marriage and was making the Facebook claim as a publicity ploy.
According to CNN, 1 in 4 polled STILL believe that President Obama was not born in this country and therefore not the legitimate head of state. Here is the published birth certificate, certified by the Republican governor of Hawaii.
“Washington (CNN) – It’s surely not what the leader of the free world wants for his birthday. But, for a stubborn group of Americans, conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace are the gifts that keep on giving.
The president celebrates his 49th birthday Wednesday. On the same day, a new national poll indicates some Americans continue to doubt the president was born in the United States. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, more than a quarter of the public have doubts about Obama’s citizenship, with 11 percent saying Obama was definitely not born in the United States and another 16 percent saying the president was probably not born in the country.”
the most recent face of resident evil since Dick Cheney left office, wants to have hearings on the meaning of “born” in the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
Ok, my head is spinning. Here’s a guy who says he thinks that the Constitution is sacrosanct. Now he thinks we ought to INTERPRET this document? Ahhh, it is sacrosanct . . . . until it’s not.
WAIT, I get it. The Constitution is crystal clear about an individual’s right to bear arms (see the muddy Second Amendment)
“Amendment II — A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Um, wait, doesn’t the Second Amendment mean that you can bear arms as part of a well regulated militia (i.e., sanctioned by a governmental entity)?
BUT Resident Evil finds it very confusing when it comes to the meaning of “born“:
“Amendment 14 Section 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Hmmm. What is the plain meaning of this? If you are born here, you are a citizen whose rights of citizenship may not be infringed upon.
Ok, this Amendment was not written by our Founding Fathers. It was written in the aftermath of Civil War as a nation needed to heal and learn to be citizens of one nation for the common good and to protect the children of newly emancipated slaves.
So, we have to have hearings on what “born in the United States” means. If McConnell and his ilk weren’t talking about people’s lives and the very meaning of a free and open society, it would almost be a humorous riff on Bill Clinton’s “depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”.
My son likes to play the lottery. He is 8 years old. Ok, he likes us to play the lottery for him. Which we do every month or so.
Why? If he wins big, he reasons, then we don’t have to work, or travel for work, and then we would get to be together 24/7 and end up killing each other. (He doesn’t think about the last point.)
He has another reason. He is endlessly fascinated by the rub-off function of finding out whether you win and by the incomprehensible instructions.
He has been winning some and we let him keep his “profit” — we take back the principal and he gets to put his winnings in his piggybank. I have been thinking about teaching him about the cost of money — interest, exit fees, prepayment penalties and premiums — as well as keeping track of his losses so that we get repaid all of our principal before he takes a profit. Real world stuff. Most of my friends think I am nuts.
But I really want him to know that there are losses associated with the lottery and that he could lose more than he makes. He needs to know that this is really not a feasible game plan for a self-sustaining future. Also, because he is too young to have learned the lesson, “if it is too good to be true, then it is, and you need to run as fast as you can in the other direction.”
I have been thinking about how to introduce this subject without sounding like the Grinch who takes pennies from a child. Then, the other day he asked, “what is addiction?” We asked him why he asks and he said that on the back of lottery tickets, they write about getting help for gambling addictions.
Ok, a cool piece cardbard with potential prizes hidden all over has now spurred my 8 year-old to ask about addiction.
My son opened the door to the conversation. POB (partner of blogger) and I walked across the threshold and gently talked about it.
So the biggest asset in the my parenting skills? My son.
I don’t know how the pollsters pick the representative sample of Americans, voters, Mets fans, whatever, to poll on a particular issue. No one asks me. My demographic is highly educated, reliable voter.
I think President Obama is the leader we need. He is the one pushing us to take the bad-tasting medicine that will make us healthier, making the financial industry face consequences of its ruinous reign and trying to end two wars with dignity. (Contrary to Michael Steele, Afghanistan was not a war of President Obama’s choosing; it was a war started by President Bush even before he chose to go to war with Iraq.)
Everyone wants our problems to be fixed, just like in the movies, and preferably within two hours and with limited commercial interruption.
President Obama took over a country on the verge of collapse and the problems just keep coming. He handles them in an understated, calm manner and people think that is a sign of weakness. But then again, “we” thought that GWB’s strutting around and baling hay were signs of strength even as we knew our nation was going to hell (think Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned).
I believe in President Obama and in his leadership.
Never has been so much asked of one man and so little been done to support him.
Last night I was in an expensive, still trendy, restaurant and the place was PACKED.
Maybe everyone there was entertaining out of town guests like I was.
Maybe that’s why it is hard to understand the true nature of our economic problems and how close we still are to the precipice. Because we all thought economic Armageddon would look like something out of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” or some other post-apocalyptic film.
Maybe not everyone in the Great Depression were like Ma or Pa Joad. Or, for that matter, like my parents and grandparents, TGFOB (two generations of family of blogger). Barely getting by, barely enough food to eat. Hey, I am not suffering like them either because I am eating at this restaurant, too, but I am constantly gripped by the fear of homelessness. (I love the freedom that 25 years, coming out as a lesbian, and being in a loving relationship afford.)
I overheard a group talking about the burden of taxes. I thought, DUDES, you’re still earning money. No one realizes that it is dumb luck that we are not like Ma and Pa Joad or TGFOB.
This reminds me of the conversation I had at my 25th college reunion with a guy who — how do I describe it — was not so much a friend but from time to time over for years we had the “benefits”. In our first conversation in more than 25 years, he mentions the European bank taxes and complains that they unfairly punish him. I couldn’t hide my disgust at his words (and at my own poor judgment so many years ago) and said maybe a little too firmly (and with a lot of “edge” to it), “Suck it up. There are people here without jobs. There was a lot of collateral damage and innocent people were punished for the stupidity of a few so if all it costs you is a few extra dollars, then pay it and feel lucky.” (I
By the way, I feel really lucky, and I am scared every day that my luck will run out. In the meantime, we eat out every now and again.
If I read the news, I will go into that bad place in my head that holds all my fears of being destitute and homeless.
The stock market is tanking, confidence is tanking, the economy is sputtering, unemployment is high and nerves are frazzled. At first, everyone was talking about a double-dip recession, then about, PHEW, how we escaped the double-dip and now, how it looks like a triple-Lutz-followed-by-triple-pike-nosedive recession.
No prognosticator today can know for sure what the Monday morning quarterback will say with a certain smug clarity (after all, he who survives gets to write the history).
But that doesn’t stop the pundits from scaring me to distraction.
“WASHINGTON – Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele is accusing President Barack Obama of exploiting for his own political gain the crisis created by the Gulf oil spill.
Responding to Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday night, Steele said in a statement that the president’s actions demonstrate his inability to lead the nation out of a disaster and show an “appallingly arrogant political calculus.” “
Explain how the President, our nation’s CEO at the time of this disaster, can exploit the disaster for political gain? This crisis threatens to sully his political future.
And what did the President say that is so problematic? He said we need to fix this and we need to decrease our dependence on oil.
Michael Steele: Do you disagreewith those sentiments?
I hope the GOP keeps loose-lips around for a loooooong time.
