The Free Market Problem

Paul Ryan and his supporters are trying to sell their spending cut and lower tax program and they’re getting booed at town hall meetings.  They’re finally cutting into people’s pockets who can’t defend themselves.  They thought they were doing what their constituency wanted and must be baffled at this negative response. Okay, this might get a bit complicated, but not really.  It just requires a shift in perspective away from the definition of capitalism we’ve been being sold since Reagan to something that is more descriptive of what actually happens.  Theory is all well and good and can be very useful in specific instances, but a one-size-fits-all approach to something as basic as resources is destined to fail. Oh, I’m sorry, let me back up a sec there—fail if your stated goal is to float all boats, to raise the general standard of living, to provide jobs and resources sufficient to sustain a viable community at a decent level.  If, on the other hand, your goal is to feed a machine that generates larger and larger bank accounts for fewer and fewer people at the expense of communities, then by all means keep doing what we’ve been doing. Here’s the basic problem.  People think that the free market and capitalism are one and the same thing.  They are not.  THEY ARE CLOSELY RELATED and both thrive in the presence of the other, but they are not the same thing. But before all that we have to understand one thing---there is no such thing as a Free Market.  None.  Someone always dominates it, controls it, and usually to the detriment of someone else. How is it a free market when one of the most salient features of it is the ability of a small group to determine who will be allowed to participate and at what level?  I’m not talking about the government here, I’m talking about big business, which as standard practice does all it can to eliminate competitors through any means it can get away with and that includes market manipulations that can devalue smaller companies and make them ripe for take-over or force them into bankruptcy.

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Matt Taibbi introduces Paul Ryan

What does Matt Taibbi think of Paul Ryan?

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
What about Ryan's "bold" plan to balance the budget? Well, it's not entirely about cutting costs. It's also about drastically cutting income: It "includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years." Ryan's budget is thus a method of forcing middle class folks to give up valuable benefits so that rich folks can pay less tax. Bill Maher isn't pleased about Ryan's suggestion that he is offering a "cause" rather than a "budget."
No, it’s not a cause, it is a budget, that’s how we should look at it and it’s how we should solve these things. But the problem is that we don’t have one party that stands up to the other side, we have two parties who are agreeing that we should cut from the EPA and people who do the inspections of food and Pell grants and home heating oil for the poor, and nobody is standing up and saying, “No, we should take it from the defense department, from foreign subsidies, from tax cuts for the rich, for corporations like GE that paid no taxes last year.” That’s what’s wrong with our political system.
And one more thing. This cartoon seems to capture another major aspect of the GOP mindset when it comes to balancing the federal budget.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi introduces Paul Ryan

Cutting the debt and war-mongering

I figure I should just put up a banner ad urging all DI readers to go read Glenn Greenwald every day. He is that good at identifying important issues of the day and making sense of them. Today he pointed out the hypocrisy of the conservatives who are urging that we need to cut the debt, but who are wiling to run the economy into the ground with endless warmongering.

[I]t's vital that we continue to splurge for military spending that is almost equal to what the entire rest of the world spends combined, and that we continue to spend 6 times more than the second-largest military spender (China). Why is that? Because we may need to fight our fourth, fifth and sixth wars (not counting the covert ones) and must remain ready to start those wars at a moment's notice. There are many things one can say about someone plagued by that warmongering mentality; that they are serious opponents of borrowed spending and debt financing is most assuredly not one of them.

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The media ignores The People’s Budget

The "People's Budget has been proposed by the 80 member Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus within the U.S. House of Representatives. The co-chair, of that caucus, Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, appeared on Democracy Now, perplexed that his budget, which is well supported by large numbers of Americans, is being ignored by the mainstream media.

We cut military spending in a significant way. The key to that, getting us out of Afghanistan and out of Iraq. And we take care—we deal with healthcare by reintroducing the public option, which could save up to $68 billion a year from providing a competitive choice for the American people. We didn’t do this on a lark. We have tracked every public opinion poll. And the American people want gas and oil subsidies to be cut. They want the rich and the corporations to pay taxes. They want military spending cut. And so, as we listen to the American people, our budget reflects that listening and really deserves a voice and deserves some attention.
Let's mark this lack of attention to a populist budget another exhibit demonstrating the the national media caters strongly to big businesses that purchase advertising and to the affluent customers to whom those ads are often aimed. Can you imagine the outcome of the following question if put on a national referendum: "Should the United States remove its military from Iraq and Afghanistan and redirected the many billions of dollars we are spending in those countries to benefit Americans at home?" Or how about this one: "Should the United States continue paying gas and oil companies tens of billion dollars in tax subsidies?"

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Afghanistan war calculator: How much did YOU pay?

This short video tells you about the Afghanistan war calculator, and then you go here to calculate the economic damage the longest war in American history is doing to you. I like the IOU offered by the site, along with the calculations. I wonder about the accuracy of these numbers because the United States is massively in debt--we are funding much of what we spend by borrowing. To the extent that we aren't actually paying for the war now, however, it makes matters much worse. It's such a strange thing for all of those "family values" politicians to be crushing the next couple of generations with debt.

Continue ReadingAfghanistan war calculator: How much did YOU pay?