Dave Smith on US war-waging, tax-free:
In 25 years, we’ve spent close to $10 trillion on wars and they didn’t tax the American people for that, as they know. They couldn’t tax us enough to pay. We would put an end to it. If they tried to raise everybody’s taxes enough to come up with $10 trillion because we want to go fight regime change wars all over the Middle East, the American people would have been like, “No, we’re not doing that.” But they didn’t do that. They kept taxes where they were. I think they even cut some rates during those years, the top rates. And then they borrowed the rest. And they still couldn’t borrow enough. So they just print the money.
And then essentially, what happens is that the price of everything just goes up and up and up. And you just put more money into the system. And then people start looking around and going like, “Geez, why is the price of housing and health care and energy and child care totally unaffordable?” And the answer is, because you’re paying for the war in Iraq. And nobody thinks about it like that, but that’s really what’s going on.
For all the young people who are coming out of college now, and they’re like, I’m 150 grand in debt. I have a gender studies major degree or whatever, you know, maybe something better than that, but they got an English degree or something. And they’re working at Door Dash, and the average house is going for 600 grand, and they’re like, “What am I possibly going to do?”
It’s like, the reason why these kids are all demanding socialism, at least on the left, is because, what else are you going to do? The reason why that is the case is because your government decided to spend trillions of dollars on blowing up brown countries, and, in some cases, then rebuilding them to blow them up again. This is the actual cost of the thing.
I feel like it’s the almost nobody outside of like the Ron Paul libertarians, the Austrian economics guys, almost nobody else ever makes this connection. This is the deal. You can’t be a world empire without having a central bank that can print money for you, because otherwise it just doesn’t work. Resources are finite, and you’ll run out of them. And so you can’t do that without having this monetary system.
But the cost of this monetary system is that prices always go up and up and up and up, and that rigs the entire economy against the working class and the middle class in favor of the rich. It’s just the way it is. When the value of assets is going up and up and up and up, that’s great if you own stuff. That’s great if you own stuff and you’re selling it. If you got a billion dollars in the bank, inflation is your best friend. But if you’re on a fixed income or you’re a working class person, it just destroys you.
