The fat cat crooksters on wall street would have us think that all of the money for society is virtually gone and that we might as well roll over, die and allow corporations to privatize our social security safety net.
Nothing--indeed could be further from the truth. These cats are rolling in dough and are smoking up our dollar bills like a wet cigarrete. Now let me tell you something you probably haven't heard because it wasn't always this way.
In the 1940's the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50, but now every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents.
After the Great Depression and World War II, the people in the top income tax bracket during the 1950's and the 1960's paid 91 cents for every dollar they earned above $100,000 to the federal government, but now they pay 35 percent for every such earned dollar.
The debt limit is something that's been raised decade after decade. Deficits are nothing new as historian William Blum writes in his August Anti-Empire report.
"The most prosperous period in American history occurred in the decades following the Second World War — from 1946 to 1973. And guess what? We had a budget deficit in the large majority of those years. Clearly such a deficit was not an impediment to growth and increasing prosperity in the United States — a prosperity much more widely shared than it is now," Blum said.
"Yet we're often fed the idea of the sanctity of a balanced budget. This and other "crises" are typically overblown for political reasons; the current "crisis" about the debt ceiling for example."
The U.S. became a debtor nation for the first time in 1914, when the United States owed more money to foreigners than it was owed. In other words, this so called "debt crisis" is nothing but pure manufactured hoax.
Richard Wolff, a visiting professor at New School University said on this Thursday's Democracy Now that the reason so much debt has accrued to the bankers in the first place is that the plutocratic American government won't tax these filthy rich cats whose feast on the lucrative profits, free of taxation, doesn't give them any incentive to put Americans to work, which would provide a strong taxable labor force. This is because they currently do not deem it in their economic interests to do so.
"The government spends more than it takes in, because it’s not taxing them. And here comes the punchline. It then turns around to the people it didn’t tax—corporations and the rich—and borrows the money from them, paying them interest and paying them back," Wolff said. "It maybe a bit of a shock to folks who don’t follow this, what the corporations are doing when they hold back the money because it’s not profitable for them to hire—is that they lend it to the United States government to fund these deficits. The United States government refuses to tax corporations and the rich. It then runs a deficit."
"If the government really wanted to do something, you wouldn’t have a national debt. We’re running a deficit because the people who run this society would like us to deal with our economic problems, not by taxing those who have money, the way we used to, but instead by endlessly borrowing from them. And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt," he added. "They want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation."
Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan Administration Paul Craig Roberts speculates that the current "political theater" occuring between Congress and Obama might really be a Wall Street Obama Republican conspiracy to privatize social security, a.k.a., turn this beneficial social program into a for-profit system.
"If the drama continues to the absolute deadline without a deal, Obama, who perhaps favors cutting the safety net as much as do the Republicans, would have to accept the Republican package in order that the troops are not cut off from supplies, Social Security checks can continue to go out, and the dollar be saved. Having opposed the Republicans to the last minute, Obama can say that he had no other recourse," Roberts said.
This would indeed be horiffic with the exception of the soldiers being cut off of supplies, which would no longer allow them to wage brutality in foriegn lands. By feigning the crash of the dollar and the possibility of seniors not getting their checks, the President could very easily ram through the Republican right-wing agenda that so bountifully melts his butter.
As long as the United States appropriates more money to launch foreign wars of occupation across the globe than it spends on domestic job creation and refuses to reign in the fatties that enslave the people to the powerful rich, we'll remain lingering in the ashtray of despondency like so many wet ciggarettes.
Richard Wolff: Debt Debate is "Political Theater"
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