Amidst the tumult of irate e-mails calling President Obama a liar for personally having raised the cigarette tax ( a tax is a tax, after all ) and a communist for unleashing THE BIGGEST TAX INCREASE OF ALL TIME, which actually is nothing of the sort, it's refreshing to hear Greenspan utter:
"I am very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money."What he's dismissing is the lifeblood of Republican economic policy and has been at least since the Reagan administration: tax cuts pay for themselves. It's policy that along with a huge increase in government agencies, military spending and a war now having cost more that World War 2 was supposed to be paid for by tax cuts, but failed. It was paid for by borrowing from foreign sources with our independence as collateral.
A rational person must have noticed by now that it doesn't work and never has worked and virtually always precipitates a recession. An irrational man, a Fox man, a Conservative man, even a Libertarian man, chants liberaliberaliberal, constructs straw stuffed scapegoats and tries to distract us with fairy tales about the President's religion and parentage.
"The problem that we've gotten into in recent years is that spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous."said the Former Federal Reserve Chairman on NBC yesterday. It's axiomatic in our new propaganda soaked world that fixing a problem is far less effective and more expensive than hiding it under foamy lipped hysteria, and so the tax cuts that were designed to expire this year by the Republicans who wrote them into law, become a surprise betrayal by Obama. Those liberals are betraying us by following the law we wrote!
The tax cuts, that if renewed will cost us $2.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion over the next decade and put us that much further in debt, since no, they will not pay for themselves as has been demonstrated but will further impoverish the nation but to the benefit of a handful of people and corporations. But that debt must be thought of differently than any debt incurred in extending unemployment benefits and the glaring hypocrisy must never be acknowledged. For are we not conservative?
"You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?"asked David Gregory on Meet the Press.
"They do not."was the emphatic reply.
I had to sit through a thankfully brief but hysterical presentation at my business exchange club from our rightie CPA while he told of all the gloom and doom of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the Obama tax increases. He could not give actual figures or even give me a website where I could puruse all the coming expirations and increases and who'll they'll affect but that did not stop him from painting the blackest of pictures of how we are about to be overwhelmed with tax burdens.
ReplyDeleteAlso, no mention as to how we will pay for all those continued tax cuts should they be reinstated by Congress - didn't seem to know how we've been paying for them for the past 8 years.
I may have to rethink my membership in this club if it continues on this political trend.
Greenspan's Marxist worldview has finally come to light. Another avid collectivist, David Stockman, was also active this weekend with an Op-Ed in the NY Times with the heading 'How my GOP destroyed the US economy'.
ReplyDeleteTalk about rats deserting a sinking ship.
In addition to Greenspam (not a typo) and Stockton, Fareed Zakaria added his voice this weekend: Let the Bush tax cuts expire.
ReplyDeleteOf the three, Greenspam is the least credible since he was the one who gave Bush the go ahead, and his "I can't believe" statement says it all.
Stockton still doesn't get it. The middle class is the engine that drives the economy, and Stockton is still talking about corporate tax incentives to create jobs ... that will continued to be outsourced no matter what the government does (read my earlier post on the Book of Jobs).
Of the three, Fareed Zakaria will be tossed into the same name-calling basket along with our President and dismissed outright.
So the shouting will continue for the rest of the year, and the Republican "Bush tax cut" ploy will probably win votes ... because Americans are always THAT STUPID.
Of course, a new industrial policy ... one that invests in infrastructure (national electrical grid, for instance), offers incentives and subsidies for alternate energy, removes the tax benefits of job outsourcing, raises tariffs on imports, levels the playing field with respect to trade, and outlaws personal financial and medical records from going to call centers overseas .... these would have an impact. Of course, the Republicans call this socialism; but the idiots fail to take into account that our global trade competitors have industrial policies that emphasize economic growth and job creation ... and we don't.
We have given away the store ... and corporate America wants it that way.
Stockton was the one who said, "The economy actually works better when it's in the red." When asked during the Reagan administartion if the tax cuts would create a large debt.
ReplyDeleteWhy wasn't Greenspan saying this during the Bush administration?
Spend more than you take in and huge debts will happen.
Gee, takes a Harvard MBA to figure that out.
I posted that Wall Street Journal chart over at my place showing that letting the Bush tax cuts expire only hurts people earning over $300G while keeping them in place forced people earning $60-$150G to pay more and it resulted in the predictable sputtering from my right wing trolls. "Bush-era tax policies" they ask? What does THAT mean? It MUST mean letting them expire means everyone pays more!
ReplyDeleteIt's like their little heads go pop-pop-pop.
I can make the argument that the Bush tax cuts punish the middle class twice. First, it skews all economic growth in the direction of the upper 0.5% income earners; the middle class has no share in wealth creation, and since salaries has been flat for a decade, real wealth declines due to the effects of inflation. Second, since the middle class pays a higher burden for the cost government, it can be said that the middle class bears a higher burden for debt service on the deficit.
ReplyDeleteBillionaire hedge fund traders paying only 15% on their incomes put this burden into sharper focus.
All these truths are self evident, but only to people who haven't been propagandized, terrorized and enraged into senselessness -- and who aren't all that bright in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe enemy isn't the Republicans, the enemy is Fox and a system of laws that allows corporations to create their own truth better than Disney can create fake worlds.
Target, taking advantage of the new ruling is now pumping a fortune into supporting the GOP. Is there anything wrong when the directors of a corporation have more political power than all the employees and shareholders combined? Only if you're liberally biased in favor of democracy.
"foamy lipped hysteria"--Fabulous!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Greenspan is going to write a McNamaran about-face someday.