Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Economoronics...Conservative Tax Policy for beginners

Via Digby:

Trading was halted in India when the Sensex index plummeted 9.75 percent within minutes of opening. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index dropped 8 percent by midday after diving 5.5 percent the day before.
"Unless we get some positive 'shock affects,' such as drastic measures from the U.S. government, there is almost no hope for a recovery in stocks," said Koji Takeuchi, senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo.
"Drastic Measures?"


We're in this mess for several reasons, but primarily because of a tax code generated shift from a manufacturing economy to a capitalist economy with no conscience or guiding force that keeps it in check.

The lust for short term profit has essentially destroyed the middle class while making the elite rich so much money that they couldn't find places to put it, except for wildly speculative ventures, ergo, the sub prime housing bubble. They kept loaning more money to more people but they still had more money to loan because we as a country aren't paying our bills with cash...We're paying our bills with money the government borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Bahranians, the...well you get the picture.

It's OK, though because the Bahranians are using the tanker loads of American money we're paying them in inflated oil prices to do really good things for all humanity...Ok, maybe Not.

The Saudis are merely funding Osama with our oil money, so relax. Between funding terrorism and the largest American mercenary army in history, your money is going to the right places.

So with food and gas bills tripling during the Bush years (yeah they did) People who are NOT in the elite rich category, which is 99% of us, have seen their cost of survival eat up their discretionary income, and I haven't even gotten to healthcare, our National disgrace. (Actually this means we've come a long way, baby, because our National Disgrace used to be Racism...That's been bumped to third behind our lousy healthcare system which is the most expensive in the whole world, and the fact that our President gets to lie in order to cover up the Vice President's acts of treason...Well, actually maybe it's forth behind the Democratic Congress's inability to grow a spine, testicles, ovaries, whatever)

Anyway, lots of Americans got sold houses they couldn't afford when Banks and mortgage lenders started using the same come on sales tactics that discount "No payments until 2011" Furniture dealers use. And, when the bill finally arrived, say about just before Xmas, people realized they couldn't buy toys and pay the mortgage because they had to have food and gas to get to what jobs they still had.

The reason for all this was that Rich people had too much money and they expected all that money to keep growing at ten percent a year, right? That's what they've always told us, even though the stock market is actually LOWER right now adjusted for everything than it was when Al Gore was refused his rightful place as President if the United States if America. So the pressure was on to find places to invest all that capital. But manufacturing was out and the only true place capital investment really works is in making things. In this case houses, only the people who were supposed to buy houses had jobs that were paying them less than ever and basic living expenses that were costing them more so the Capitalists backed crazy schemes that couldn't possibly work.

Think about that! It was a giant "rent to own" Ponzi scheme...Duh! Only when it came time to repossess the big screen TV it wasn't worth the mortgage. Rich people are about to lose some money over this, therefore this is a huge crisis in America.

So! We have a crisis for Rich people. The middle class has already been screwed so no new crisis here...They just won't have jobs or a place to live, that's all.

Anyway, George W. Bush is still on the job, for reasons which I simply cannot understand, but mostly having to do with Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid having only one testicle between them. George Bush's response to all this is to immediately come out and say "We need to make all those temporary tax cuts, which give even more money to people who already have so much money that they make stupid investments that crash our economy, permanent...Ostensibly, so that they can make even stupider investments and maybe destroy the economy of the whole freakin' world this time, except that the tax cuts will be in dollars and the rest of the world has figured out that dollars have become pretty worthless under George W. Bush.

The value of the Dollar is the unspoken disaster. The Canadian dollar, once about 60 American cents, is now worth much more than the American dollar. Feel good about yourselves, America! Even the French Canadians have run a better economy than you have.

So the Republican tax and monetary policy tanked our economy and their answer to a tanked economy is to do more of the things that tanked our economy, and take care of those poor Rich people who have to make do with one less diamond on the mistress's finger.

They need a tax cut?

I say, "Peace on 'em."

The only way to rebuild our economy is to rebuild the Middle Class. That can't happen until the extremes of both poverty AND wealth are attacked. The gap between the Middle Class and the elite 1% of the wealthy must be eliminated.

It is the only way to save rich people from an American Bastille Day.

Steve

Want to see how bad the disparity is? Income used to be described by a Bell curve in America. Conservative policy has given rise to a new term:

The L Curve

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