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Raise Taxes and Cut Services? Why Not Stop Unneccesary Bailouts, Unnecesary Wars and Unnecessary Interest Costs Instead?
House majority leader Steny Hoyer - a close ally to President Obama - says the U.S. needs to raise taxes and cut spending .
As Agence France-Presse reports:
The
United States must embrace a blend of tax increases and spending cuts
to rein in its deficit or face a potentially crippling debt crisis like
the one in Greece, a top US lawmaker warned Monday.
"It is enough
to look across the Atlantic at Greece's extreme economic crisis and
understand: It can happen here. If we don't change course, it will
happen here," said Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer...
"It
seems to me that the only solution that can win the support of both
parties is a balanced approach: one that cuts some spending and raises
some revenue while avoiding extremes in either direction," he said.
Of course, many others have warned of the massive debt overhand in the U.S. as well.
But why aren't our government "leaders" talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?
And why aren't any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? And see this.
And why aren't they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants - which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) - and give it back to the states?
If we did these things, we wouldn't have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.
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"There is no way on God's Green Earth that the entitlement-oriented, unproductive and expensive consuming classes can..."
There is no class more demanding of entitlement then those who inherited their wealth and who haven't done anything productive since the 19th and early 20th when they were rightly referred to as robber barons. What kind of fantasy world do you live in. Police and fire and many roads come from local taxes paid out of the paychecks of the consuming class. And who sent their paychecks off-shore and destroyed the country's manufacturing capability and drove families into poverty? Just who was that anyway? Your beloved "Productive" class. Are you Alice in Wonderland? or haven't you done much reading lately.
The western democracies as you refer to them are insolvent precisely because of the activity of paper pushing ultra-rich that you refer to as productive, and who haven't done an honest day's work in their entire lives. Boy, have you bought into the bullshit.
Populist claptrap, anonymous...!
"Productivity" to you guys is nothing more than selling your labour. The City in the U.K. and Wall Street in the U.S. were arguably the most 'productive' enterprises of all during the "boom" years, in terms of attracting funds to their respective countries and economies.
What planet do you come from? Is "productive" nothing more than sweaty labour? Does not money produced amount to at least SOME sort of "productivity"? Can your beloved working class produce a thing without capital?
It's called "capitalism" for a reason. Capital. Most of the consuming classes don't have any: you seriously think that the middle classes are NET CONTRIBUTORS to the tax coffers??
Are some stupid bitch born into the Ivy League without any further connection to the outside world? Do you think that most of the people commenting on this site are ditch diggers and dry wall installers? Capital is rare because it was moved overseas. Your concept of labor is someone sweating in a hole somewhere and that's the end of it.
Most of those commenting on ZH have college degrees if not advanced degrees, have worked for corporations, have produced real things and know the score. So, they are intimately aware of the clap-trap bullshit that is apparently your specialty.
And to you productivity is defrauding investors world-wide as you sell "AAA" bonds out the front door while you short the same bonds at the same time out the backdoor. Then
beg the Federal Government to come to your rescue by paying off your insurance policies. This is your idea of productive? Productivity means producing something, not shuffling fraudulent paper.
Capital is not paper pushing manipulation or the entry of digits into a computer but the capability to produce real products. In fact the working class owns significant capital commonly known as tools. The tools to make real things.
You're a Wall Street shill. Right?
tiffany & Co
glad you said "arguably the most productive" because there certainly is an argument about it: some say the expansion from 1982 to 2007 was largely a levering of the advanced economies at all levels, the accumulation of government, corporate and personal debt beyond the levels of prudence and even historical example.
especially in the case of government, largely but not exclusively under "conservatives", this latter is ironic and revealing. it is the opposite of the recommendation of keynes, some fifty to seventy-five years ago: reduce government debt/accumulate surplus in expansion so as to increase national debt/reduce surplus in the deflationary depression contraction. this recent period could better be described as (crony) capitalism in the bull market and socialism (for the rich) in the bear.
Do you know what the effective tax rate for the bankster welfare bitches are?
Examples: http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/16/goldman-sachs-to-pay-1-tax-rate/
http://www.bearishnews.com/post/136
Productive , yeah right!
People making less than 10% of what the welfare banksters made pay a much higher tax rate!
IMO, you have no credibility.
It is called fascism for a reason.
If I can sell CMBS, insurance policies, CDS, etc., to gullible and too-lazy-to-read-the-fine-print investors overseas, without intentionally misrepresenting anything, I will likely bring many hundreds of millions of $ back to this country. Seems very productive to me.
Labour, flipping 200 hamburgers or cleaning 10 hotel rooms a day...well, that is not even in the same league of productivity.
And if paying taxes is such an orgiastic thrill, and if you love government so much, then by all means pay more.
If I can sell CMBS, insurance policies, CDS, etc., to gullible and too-lazy-to-read-the-fine-print investors overseas, without intentionally misrepresenting anything, I will likely bring many hundreds of millions of $ back to this country. Seems very productive to me.
lollercoaster. I am seeing more and more of this desperately pathological (pathologically desperate?) sentiment. The fact that the instruments you list were fradulent = mispriced doesnt change anything? How does selling fraudulently misrepresented paper actually produce anything? It merely moves money from one place to another, and it is theft, not production. To produce wealth, something has to be made. You ignore that the fraudulent nature of the "productive" activity you describe caused the crash in the first place, and is right now in the process of destroying the very system that made it possible in the first place.
So if you have the guy with millions $ buying stuff from outside of the country you call him counterproductive? Counselling your amazing productivity?
By your logic, up until he confessed Bernie Madoff was one of the most "productive" men in the nation. And look how much "capital" Ben Bernanke created in a day last March. You advocate Ponzi schemes.
"Now look at who has the voting power. It's not the wealthy people who produce more, but the masses of people who consume more. That means the political power is in the hands of the takers, not the givers."
BS from a major BSer, Jerome Schneider.
"Voting power" doesn't mean squat. An illusion sold to the masses in order to keep them thinking they have some sort of power to change things as they get eviserated.
Power is what counts and that is in the hands of the the wealthy who own the two parties you get a "choice" over in voting.
It amazes me with all that has gone down over the last few years that people still don't get it. They still want to believe it's the "Welfare Queens" that are doing it to them.
The welfare queen bitches, are doing it to us! Goldie Sacks, JP Morgan, Morgana Stanley, Merrille Lynch, Wellsie Fargo, etc., etc.
Milbank, I agree.
And damn good they don't have real voting power, too. Because, if the middle classes truly controlled government, we'd all likely be living in some kind of hyperinflationary, planned economy Wonderland...
How'd YOU like to have YOUR income "redistributed"?
My income is redistributed now...to the banking cartel and the military/industrial complex.We live in a representative republic.And the representatives obey the lobbyists of the two groups mentioned.Choosing which dolt will sell me out in the current system seems pretty pointless.
I will be actively voting against all incumbents from here on...if only to make the scum spend more money to corrupt the new ones and in the forlorn hope an actual representative of the people, as opposed to the power, gets elected.
why milbank, you're dead stone right. he sounded like he identified with the rich rather than was one.
Like Steny Hoyer knows anything about anything; what a total buffoon.
Compared to Nancy Pelosi he is the one-eyed man.
Village Idiot and the Village Bitch... Pelosi is the Village Idiot...
" unnecessary imperial adventures? "
George, until somebody comes up with a substitute to the roughly 6 gigatons of petroleum energy equivalent the world uses per year directly, by simply refining and burning oil and its distillates, to provide the foundation of our "modern civilization," these various imperial adventures are the developed world's elite's - and therefore, our - national energy policy.
Gee, it's too bad that nobody listened to Jimmy Carter 30 years ago when he said we needed to reduce our usage of oil, isn't it?
Bullshit.
How many nuclear power plants and Li-Ion battery cells could be bought for, say, half the cost of the Iraq war? How many natural gas vehicles and filling stations? We're awash in natural gas and we have enough uranium and thorium for well over ten thousand years (or longer with higher-tech methods of using it).
With the other half? Well, Canada has as much oil as Saudi Arabia but it needs a major capital investment to build the infrastructure to extract and refine it (it requires different technology). I also wonder how much biofuel production capacity could be built with a half trillion dollars.
There is no energy problem.
We have a bag of potato chips we've been munching on for 100 years and it's getting empty. The pantry is full of peanuts and cheesy poofs, but we're too lazy to get off the couch and walk in there and open a bag. Instead, we're starting to cry like a little bitch because we think our fat stupid ass is going to starve.
you are wrong on the nuclear power plants. If we
could replace all coal and natural gas power plants in
the USA with nuclear it would take 10,000 of the
largest plants (1000 Mwatt) and we would exhaust all
nuclear fuel in 20 years - the answer is solar. The
amount of energy striking the earth from the sun is
20,000 times the whole worlds daily use (approx 15
terawatts)
DH, great comment in general, but that final paragraph is a masterpiece.
E=peanutsXcheesy poofs^2
Yeah, I think that last paragraph is the energy crisis in a nutshell. The kitchen is full of food, but it's not in line of sight from the couch and we're watching "Ow! my balls!" We're gonna starve!
Oh wait... Iraq has a bag of chips and they're sitting on the other couch! So we go punch them in the face and steal their chips. Mmmmm... hand to mouth goodness!
(Look into the amount of uranium, thorium, natural gas, wind energy potential, and total solar flux in the southwest if you want to see how much of an energy crisis we have.)
I agree completely with your above two posts, and the fact that Spaceballs is one of my favorite movies of all time has absolutely nothing to do with it.
and said adventures make so little economic sense it's laughable. where was the oil in vietnam (oh right, off the coast). it was anti-communist great gamers fighting anti-colonialists. where's the oil in iraq? getting blown up by terrsts. saddam would have sold us all the oil he could pump, as would iran, etc. the petroleum argument doesn't account for much in these machinations, a little at the margin, a pipeline here, a national group that might be more amenable to manipulation there, more as camoflage than anything else. who were the people at the center of the war in iraq? who wants war with iran? the neo-conservatives (read likud/settlers) and their u.s. supporters. look at the personnel behind the propaganda.
Right on. ++
Just remember that militarily this isn't the 1700's anymore. You make it sound as though our military is going on "unnecessary imperial adventures" to spread religion, procur rare spices, or search for the fountain of youth or something. Nuclear weapons are a reality.
especially within the US
Just remember that, militarily, cities could be wiped out in the 1700's, too. In fact, in the 1700's B.C., cities could be wiped out. Also, the word is "procure", not "procur".
Hmm...
"our military is going on "unnecessary imperial adventures" to spread religion, procur rare spices, or search for the fountain of youth or something"
Then..................Now
spread religion.......spread democracy
procure rare spices...procure rare oil
search for............search for weapons of mass destruction or something
Doesn't sound too different today as it did in the 1700's.
"our military is going on "unnecessary imperial adventures" to spread religion, procur rare spices, or search for the fountain of youth or something"
Yeah, we are sending our military to search for even rarer things, in fact the rarest of them all: WMD in Iraq!
The story goes that in fact many WMDs were discovered in Iraq, but the problem was that everything they discoverd had made in the USA stenciled on it. Of course, the US knew that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because the US sold them to him in the 1980s.
It would also be super cool if we could somehow get the world to buy Natural gas in dollars.
Maybe, if we could somehow insure a pipeline from the Caspian to India... Hmmmmm*superfluous ellipsis*
+++
The primary activities of the US govt are killing, stealing and lying.
You don't expect them to step away from their core competencies do you?
Greece is the word is the word that you heard, its got a groove got a feeling yeah yeah yeah
See you're thinking like a little guy. The USD needs some level of machismo (bully wars) to verify it's virility or the rest of the world would discover that's it's only a potato down their pants.
Raising taxes is easier done through inflation.
Bankers can't trust politicians to control the currency. I agree with them on that one.
Those that speak of "trusting the politicians" to control currency are, knowingly or not, shills for the FED.
At least it seems that way to me.....
"Our mission, established by legislative action in 1919, is to promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota."
http://www.banknd.nd.gov/
END THE FED
And we can't trust either one.