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Politics & ReligionWell Since every damn forum has one. Might as well leave it out there. This place is loosely moderated and should not be entered if you're weak of heart.
So, downward transfer of wealth is bad, but the reverse is good?
Nice article. It's long, but try, anyway.
The Dirty Little Secret in McCain’s 'Socialism' Charge, by Robert Freeman
John McCain’s drowning campaign has grasped at the straw of “socialism” to try to smear Barack Obama’s economic proposals. The dirty little secret is that socialism is much more characteristic of McCain’s policies than Obama’s. But it’s socialism for the rich.
It has been an explicit tenet of Republican economic policy since at least Ronald Reagan that the rich need more money and that it is the essential job of government to make sure they get it.
This is what David Stockman, Reagan’s first Budget Director, meant when he let slip that supply side economics was really a “Trojan Horse” intended to pass the nation’s wealth upward. Reagan pursued that goal with evangelical fury.
He enacted a dizzying array of tax and spending policies, all designed to benefit the wealthy. He cut the marginal tax rate for the highest income earners from 75% to 38%. A huge bonanza in its own right, this was only the beginning of the ladling.
Reagan’s massive budget deficits drove up long term interest rates, another boon to the rich. The rich are lenders and lenders prefer higher interest rates. Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, delivered in spades, turning the U.S. treasury into a printing press for the rich. The data speak for themselves.
Jimmy Carter's last deficit was $77 billion. By the end of the Bush I era, deficits had reached $300 billion a year and the national debt had quadrupled, from $1 trillion when Reagan took over, to $4 trillion. Interest payments on that debt had soared from $70 billion a year under Carter to over $300 billion a year.
Virtually all of that went to the plutocratic elite that rents the Republican party as a political front for its predations on the treasury. And since payments on government bonds are tax exempt, it was all tax free.
Clinton reversed Reagan’s tax cuts, at least partially, and began running budget surpluses. As a result, long term interest rates declined 40%, a huge blow to the magical fiscal money machine Republicans had constructed to funnel wealth to themselves. This is the real reason Clinton was so relentlessly, viciously hounded while in office.
George W. Bush reinstated the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, handing, in true socialism-for-the-rich fashion, the better part of $1.6 trillion to the top 1% of income earners. And just as his father and Reagan before him had done, he ran up massive budget deficits, again re-igniting that interest paying money machine that works so effectively, so covertly, to lard the coffers of the very rich.
In fiscal year 2009, just begun, the deficit will exceed $1 trillion. Interest payments on the now $15 trillion national debt will exceed $500 billion a year, virtually all of it going to the very richest, Bush’s “base” as he calls them. In the process, the wealthy have conscripted the working and middle classes to generations of debt peonage to pay for these debts.
But the socialism hardly ends with the deficits. Military spending of almost $1 trillion a year — more than all the rest of the world combined — is another favorite Republican device for transferring wealth upward.
Bush’s unprovoked war in Iraq will cost more than $3 trillion before it is over, according to Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz. The bounty to weapons makers and logistics companies, both favored Republican charities, is incalculable.
Ignoring anti-trust laws and in the process enshrining monopolies; refusing to enforce environmental laws so as to convert public natural resources to private gain; hundreds of the largest corporations in the country paying no income taxes; literally outlawing competitive bids for pharmaceutical companies servicing government contracts.
In these and a thousand other ways, Republican economic policy carries out its one enduring, central goal: using government to enrich those who are already the richest, everybody else be damned.
And now, the finishing touch, the financial coup d’ etat of the Wall Street bailout.
Middle class taxpayers are being forced to hand over more than $2 trillion to the very wealthiest people on the planet, not because the taxpayers themselves had failed, not because it’s fair, not because it will do anything to solve the underlying problems with the economy, but because the Republican reign is now visibly at its end, and the gangsters in charge want to carry out one last plunder on the bank. So they have.
The result of decades of such policies is staggering. In 1980, the top 20% of income earners garnered 44% of national income. Today it’s over 51%. The top 1% alone make more than the 40% of the lowest income earners combined.
In wealth terms, the disparity is even more staggering. The top 1% own more than 60% of all assets in the U.S. while the bottom 40% have a combined net worth of zero.
Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once commented, “We can have great disparities of wealth or we can have democracy. But we cannot have both.” That’s where we’ve arrived at today.
McCain is right. There is socialism going on in the management of the economy, but not in the way he wants us to believe. It is socialism for the rich. And that’s they way they’ve planned it. It's the shaft for working Americans but for Republicans, it's just another “Mission Accomplished.”
First off, tax cuts are not a redistribution of wealth, so this is a straw-man argument.
Let's say I make $100. Today, the government takes $30 from me in taxes. Tomorrow a tax cut goes into effect and they only take $20 from me instead. No income has been redistributed, I'm merely keeping more of what I made.
If you want to whine about the budget deficit as a back-door method of transferring wealth to the rich, you might want to take note of the fact that there is NO chance of Obama's plan actually reducing the deficit. Invoking Clinton's name will not help him. Clinton reaped the dividend of the end of the cold war, which Reagan achieved through his deficit spending, and he did it by gutting our military. Clinton also had the short-term benefit of the unsustainable tech bubble to temporarily prop-up revenues.
Obama doesn't have any of these economic dynamics to take advantage of, and his tax-and-spend ultra-liberal agenda will be a disaster to attempt during a recession. His tax giveaway redistribution plan will pay out more than it takes in, and he's planning at least another $1 trillion in additional spending.
Clinton reversed Reagan’s tax cuts, at least partially, and began running budget surpluses. As a result, long term interest rates declined 40%, a huge blow to the magical fiscal money machine Republicans had constructed to funnel wealth to themselves. This is the real reason Clinton was so relentlessly, viciously hounded while in office.
Strangely, though, the national debt continued to increase, and our military was weakened. Wonder how that happened?
Strangely, though, the national debt continued to increase, and our military was weakened. Wonder how that happened?
Primarily because idiots don't know the difference between budget deficits and the national debt.
And Clinton's poor weak military went and busted ass on both Afghanistan and Iraq. They are in much worse shape now (like everything Bush touches) than they were when Bush took them over.
Wait, so I'm not an idiot in this thread because I point out the national debt as opposed to budget surplus... or I am an idiot because I pointed that out?
You must have multiple definitions of idiot in the same way you do of civil war.
And Clinton's poor weak military went and busted ass on both Afghanistan and Iraq. They are in much worse shape now (like everything Bush touches) than they were when Bush took them over.
Link?
Bush used what Clinton left him in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they did a great job considering the handicap that Clinton saddled them with. It was Clinton that gutted our active-duty military and offloaded much of the heavy-lifting to state National Guard units. Bush didn't do that, he got stuck with it.
Oh poor poor jesus h bush....poor poor little boy!
It was Clintons fault why he couldn't do what the voices in his head told him!
Now here is a good one, why is the rich getting a tax break ok but when one talks about the middle class getting a tax break it's called class war fare?
After all the middle class didn't start the war, the rich did via buying out the gop.
Look, those who want higher income citizens to pay significantly higher percentages of their income in taxes can't accept that they are imposing a greater financial burden on the higher income earners. They have to develop a convoluted logic to explain that it's not really "unfair" (whatever that means), but actually it's making the wealthy pay their "fair share" (again whatever THAT means).
Doing this takes the argument out of the realm of Objective information (ie, we got huge debts AND massive budgetary problems that can only be solved with more more money. The wealthy have more money, so that's where we gotta get it), and puts into the Subjective/Moralistic rhetoric (ie, their not paying their fair share!!!111).
Basically, the bills have to be paid. If you need $1000 more from each citizen to pay the bills, it becomes a major problem to take that from folks where you're increasing their taxes 20-100%.
It's a whole lot easier to whack the higher income earners 5-10% more (starting at around $5,000).
Personally, it pisses me off. I'm more the able to understand that I'm gonna have to pay more taxes because the govt F'ed up again, but I don't appreciate being told that I haven't been paying my "fair share" all along.
I think in the end, this all boils down to one fundamental view:
Do you believe that the rich should pay a higher burden of the cost of society?
If the answer is yes, then you essentially side with the people who suggest that its grossly unfair to have such a disparity of wealth sponsored by our government.
If the answer is no, then you side with the free market capitalists and the people who say that no one should be required to spend a dime to help someone else.
Here is what I want to know: Where the hell are the people like me, who believe that you can regulate the market and reduce the wealth divide in a fair way? I believe we can help the poor and working class AND still have a system that allows people to become wealthy through hard work.
I am so SO tired of this argument, because I seem to be one of the only people saying that there is a middle ground.
Bush used what Clinton left him in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they did a great job considering the handicap that Clinton saddled them with. It was Clinton that gutted our active-duty military and offloaded much of the heavy-lifting to state National Guard units. Bush didn't do that, he got stuck with it.
Wah wah wah wah...
This is what Bush and you neo-cons did with the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.
"So, downward transfer of wealth is bad, but the reverse is good?"
So, point out where they taxed the lower income poeple more to make the rich richer?
I don't think you can defend wealth redistribution by showing how it was done less for those evil rich people.
So, downward transfer of wealth is bad, but the reverse is good?
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