Just as soon as we change Welfare Reform, the Telecommunications Act, NAFTA & GATT, DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (One down – yea!), Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
The one thing Clinton left us I’m especially glad we are going to fix is the part of GATT that created the WTO and set up Most Favored Nation Status for China that cost America 50,000 factories and the eight million workers who used to support tens of thousands of communities and thus millions of other jobs across the nation.
But fear not, while “free trade” with an authoritarian dictatorship that shelters and eventually co-opts polluting, worker-abusing American traitor companies who value profits over country, and then uses the hundreds of billions in profits to build up their military and pollute the planet even more than we do, I have read reports that indicate our GDP is up 0.7% from 2000-2010.
And if that wasn't enough to make you think destroying our middle class to better serve the plutocracy wasn't quite worth it, the always true blue patriotic woman-caring-economic-genius Larry Summers reported, “that the lowered tariffs that resulted from Clinton's trade policies, which reduced prices to consumers and kept inflation low, were technically the largest tax cut in the history of the world.”
So we have that going for us, also too. Rest assured you fifteen million unemployed workers that Democrats have kept taxes low like Republicans demanded on that salary you used to have.
And before we get too distracted with this latest Democratic Party implementation of (capitulation to) horrible Republican Party ideas, let’s talk health care reform.
You know, the left-wing socialist plot that funnels 450 billion annually to the insurers, providers and Wall Street with no cost controls that doesn’t cover everyone and most people hate because it’s a Republican think tank plan “modified” by a health care lobbyist already working back in the industry, and as with most Republican plans – it sucks!
That’s the key right there folks. Believe it or not, most voters know Republican ideas suck and always fail, which is why they’d really appreciate it - and “Reagan Democrats” might even come back and make Republicans a permanent minority - if Democrats would finally show the courage of their convictions and explain why liberal policies work and conservative policies consistently fail to achieve their objectives and cause more harm than good.
And no, sorry villagers and weak-assed Democrats, having something passed into legislation rather than nothing isn’t always the best you can hope for, policy-wise or politically, and certainly not for your constituents’ well-being.
So if you’d finally dump the strategy of arguing from the Republican point of view with an ironic sense of comity while your throats are being cut and your lunch eaten you’d get more respect and educate the electorate all at the same time.
This fiscal curb fiasco and the previous debt ceiling sabotage are part and parcel of a stated Republican strategy to bankrupt the nation when in power and exploit the results by blaming Democrats for the chaos that follows. Republicans and their failed policies ran up most of the debt while decimating what made us a great country, and yet our policies continually move ever rightward regardless of who’s in charge.
This greatest hoax in the history of American politics is only possible because almost half the country believes exactly the opposite of proven macroeconomic time-tested theory, and our own nation’s history. The entire debt debate is a farce and an insult to the collective intelligence of a formerly civilized nation. That’s right, America, we’re a laughingstock among countries.
In America, where the richest of the rich shelter their wealth overseas to avoid paying the taxes the rest of us end up paying for from our own pockets, where corporations took tax giveaways to subsidize moving infrastructure and manufacturing to low wage, environmental law-free hell holes and their intellectual property to tax havens, where 66% of Fortune 600 companies pay zero taxes in any given tax year and the largest get millions in refunds, where virtually zero net jobs were created in eight years after the Bush tax cuts, almost half the country believes Republican orthodoxy that our debt is the main problem, making the plutocracy pay their fair share raises taxes on “job-creating” small businesses, and entitlements must be slashed for our economic survival.
Way to educate the electorate on basic economics, Democrats. I’m so glad poor people know which side their bread is really buttered on.
Fortunately for us, one problem we REALLY took care of the first time is with the awesome and greatly feared (not) Dodd/Frank legislation, where all of the illegal bankster scams that were throwing millions into the streets instead of thousands of casino gamblers on Wall Street into jail…oh wait.
We had a good chance after 2008 to jerk this country back from the economic dystopian right wing lassiez faire policies of the last generation, and yet here we are negotiating from weakness even when we hold the better hand, and simultaneously lending unwarranted credibility to a failed economic philosophy that will eventually destroy us all.
Increasing taxes is fair and good, because government spending is an essential and necessary component in a healthy economy, and government does not only do many things more efficiently than the private sector ever could, it almost always does things better and cheaper. Think troops peeling potatoes or Haliburton contracts to peel potatoes, or the sub-contracted electrocution chambers also known as troop shower stalls versus what our SEABEES could have made for far less.
We grew the best as a country when taxes were at the highest and regulations their strongest from 1947-1973, a period that not-sold-out-to-the-plutocracy actual economists call the “great compression”. Which means that not only did the middle class prosper as the elites prospered during this period, but their wages grew even faster than those at the top; narrowing the wage gap.
Keynesian Economics works and America’s embarrassingly low entitlement spending should be increased. Private pensions are essentially gone and private investments raided by the 1%, so the final remaining leg of the “three-legged stool” should be strengthened rather than slashed for both purposes of a permanent economic stimulus and a jobs program that moves older workers out of the workforce.
Even when we have to compromise to move anything forward, couldn't someone bedsides Bernie Sanders and Paul Krugman be advocating the historically proven progressive, yes liberal, agenda? Anyone?
We came within a CPI-Chained whisker this time or going in the opposite direction of sanity, but managed to only partially drown our ability to stave off another recession in the bathtub, but wait until the next debt ceiling “debate”.
Let me guess that no one will be explaining 24/7 to the American people that it would be in their own long term self-interests to actually use CPI-E since the current CPI index already doesn’t even keep up with inflation as it is for seniors.
Oh. And raise mitt Romney’s taxes immediately, traitor.