Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s corporate handlers have decided there’s a possibility the economy might improve by November, leading Americans to consider re-electing the dreaded Black President. So they’ve ordered Boehner to focus everyone’s attention on budget deficits again by having him threaten to run the stock market off a cliff just like he did last July.
Of course, budget deficits aren’t really the biggest problem facing the United States – rampant and continuing high unemployment is. And here’s the irony: If Boehner and the House Republicans and their corporate sponsors focused half as hard on infrastructure spending measures that create construction jobs as they have on their phony budget deficit play-acting, then guess what? The side effect of putting people back to work is that they pay payroll taxes again, thereby increasing government revenue and thereby decreasing budget deficits. You have to spend money to make money. Boehner and his corporate handlers are plenty smart enough to know that. They just don’t care, because derailing the dreaded Black President’s re-election campaign is more important than helping to put the crummy American peasantry back to work. Hell, the American peasantry doesn’t ever make political contributions, so what do they expect?
Meanwhile, if Boehner and his corporate handlers ever did get their way and were able to cut back government spending for Social Security and Medicare and food stamps and public education and subsidized student loans, then what do you think would happen? Why, with government programs and services gone, the corporate plutocrat tax rate could be cut and those rich guys would be so tickled that they’d probably build new factories and stores right on the spot and prosperity would grow like grapes on the vine, right? That is what the current Great Minds on the Right would have us believe.
This Paul Ryan/Austrian economic/GOP line of B.S. is incredibly similar to the policies that have been meted out in Europe for the past few years by Merkel and the Germans, who have been calling the shots in the Euro Zone.
Forced fiscal austerity has worked out so well that Irish unemployment is about 15%, Greek unemployment is above 21% and Spanish unemployment is around 24%. What do you suppose unemployment at that level does for a government’s ability to pay off its debts? If you answered that it kills a government’s ability to pay off its debts, you are correct.
In Spain, the big banks are on the brink of failure and the government just found out again that hardly any investors are crazy enough to buy their sovereign bonds.
In Greece, the people are collectively so poor that no more blood can be squeezed from their turnips, and the country has no choice but to default on its national debt, drop out of the Euro group and go back to its old currency, the drachma, which would come out of the chute heavily devalued against the euro and the dollar. While the Germans may want to believe otherwise, the Greeks themselves know better. In the first 10 days since their last elections, Greeks have withdrawn more than 3 billion euros from their banking accounts so as to avoid the losses they’ll take when they go back to the old currency.
Whatever happens to world stocks and the banks in Spain and Portugal after the Greek default, it won’t be pretty.
So when John Boehner or Paul Ryan or some other Republican economic genius tries to get you all lathered up about the need to cut government spending before the unemployment rate comes down, go take a look at how well that exact philosophy has worked out for the Europeans.
And increasingly, there is little we in the peasantry can do to stop the madness except to rage against it on occasion, an action which I have just completed.
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