“We think too much and feel too little.” –Charlie Chaplin
Why do you suppose it is we place such value on persons who do little more than make money? Hear me out. If persons who run businesses provide services we like and/or need, I have little disagreement with using monetary instruments as devices that is simply easier while helping facilitate efficient transfers and allowing for greater flexibility of potential acquisitions beyond the basic “this for that” mentality that is the bread and butter of a basic, meaning it works, but limited in scope and application bartering system.
However, when creation of wealth, power and societal influence are all coupled together into the hands of persons who do nothing more than manipulate existing capital in a way where nothing of value is produced or manufactured for consumption by the general public the number of zeros you add to already existing bank accounts becomes nothing more than an exercise in damage control to a sociopathic need to horde valuable and necessary resources.
Far better are our individual rights as Americans to own property served by funds circulating through a vibrant economy and not sitting in an offshore account that adds literally nothing to the economic health of the average participant, be they owners, employers or employees having been as a practical matter denied even the most basic of opportunities to better their everyday lives.
In fact, lack of adequate capital flowing through a capitalist system speaks for itself with the upshot being too many financial resources concentrated into too few hands to sustain, must less grow the economic well-being of any given closed monetary system we call our economy.
Many of the commercial problems we are facing today, inadequate employment, out-sourcing, lack of manufacturing, donor states supporting debtor states, government spending, deficits, are caused by the inability to utilize American dollars for the benefit of the American people.
Do you believe America is rich when the corporate master class is obscenely rich? All 40 or so of them? Considering we now know trickle-down economics has dead-ended itself in three billionaires shooting themselves into space so they can inevitably profit from space safaris for the rich and famous? You know, yet another playground for those of privilege?
Try to think of it this way. What if less than one percent of the American population owned 99% of the water that they kept off-limits to the general-public for no good reason and only because under our current well past its prime, mature, late-term and highly predatory capitalist, with a big slice of socialism in the form of corporate subsidies to already profitable companies, formed an economy that for some reason allowed for it?
Make no mistake we are seeing unchecked greed on steroids coupled with the open and egregious corruption of the Trump era, our government being the one entity that we depend on to curb such abuses becoming a large part of the problem and in no way offering any solutions still haunting us as we struggle to find the right balance of cost cutting, incentives and interests necessary to foster an economy that works for everyone.
Let me ask you another question. When it comes to taxes, how does it make sense to tax the poorest among us? If you were looking for a source of readily available capital, would you rob an abandoned gas station or a bank? Remember, the creation of greater and greater wealth requires an ever-growing need for resources and services that we all share in common as occupants of this planet.
Oil, metals, water, all of these assets cannot actually be “owned” by anyone and even if you support the fallacy of “mineral rights” or sales of federally owned lands for mining purposes without the public’s consent often leaving behind an environmental disaster in place of what was formerly protected national parks the responsibility to clean up your own messes does not fall to additional influxes of taxpayer dollars while the perpetrators pad their profits at our expense.
If nothing else, isn’t it time to stop thinking about making justifications, you know, thinking too much about our economy and just admit what our feelings have always told us? That an economy can only do better when everyone is doing better? That no amount of economic theories, supply and demand, supply side, austerity, trickle down, only matter if they work for the most people most of the time?
Where do we go from here? Historically and politically speaking, at least since the Reagan era, America’s economy has always fared far better for the average citizen who is neither already a millionaire nor a close personal friend of the president when we have a Democratic president in office.
Why this is so has a startlingly simple answer. Priority of interest. Starting with Reagan, whose #1 priority was to take as much money out of the federal government and returning it to the rich through tax cuts.
Skipping over George Bush the Elder whose “Read my lips no new taxes” pledge that he did not honor and therefore cost him a second term, Bill Clinton’s #1 was lowering the deficit that Reagan, yes Reagan tripled. Through a series of tax increases to the higher earners, as well as reasonable budget and overall tax reform (things Reagan did not do) the economy rebounded.
Then came George W. Bush the Younger whose policies, even if dictated for the most part by Dick Cheney (Halliburton ring a bell?) again went back to benefiting mostly through corporate tax rates to the rich, well, we know how his administration’s economic policies ended up. Worst recession/depression since the Great Depression ring a bell?
Then, Barack Obama came into office and literally had to rebuild our economy from scratch. With the racist inspired Republicans blocking his every move from saving GM and putting our workforce back to work, to battling rampant foreclosures in the housing market, to bailing our major banks not because he wanted to but to stop the bleeding, he brought back our economy to a fairly good semblance of a vibrant economy but eschewing the interests of Wall Street and focusing on Main Street.
Then came the Trump years where a Republican president, even with the benefit of a recovering economy that if he had done nothing would have been better, well, I think the economic wounds are still fresh enough in minds to allow for something less than the long list of idiotic and D.O.A. economic decisions he and the unbelievably unfit for duty Secretary of the Treasury Steve “Bankruptcy Expert” Mnuchin made. “Nuff said”, another major setback for our nation’s economic well-being under a Republican president in the White House.
Now, with the defeat of the Covid-19 pandemic center stage, followed closely by Building Back Better our economy a close second, the Biden Administration, at some point relatively soon will place taxes on the wealthiest of Americans, you know all 40 or so of them, and again, shifting the emphasis of our economic values back to the average American who wants to go to work, pay their mortgages and utilities, feed their children and send them to school, without worrying about which non-taxpaying billionaire will sort their penis shaped rocket in space first while they dutifully pay their own fair share of taxes.
Economies do not have to be blind to the needs of the people, all the people. This is called compassion and I have yet to find a place inside or out of government, when loving and caring for our brothers and sisters isn’t part of the mix. We call this “feeling” the problem, as opposed to ignoring its patent wisdom in place of the selfish and self-serving thoughts of a handful of sociopaths who hoard dollars for a living.
So, what is it going to be? Shall we start going more with our gut? Or rationalizing our way back to the Republican brand, now weaponized of “I’ve got mine”, and yes you can go to hell for I really don’t care, do you?
Now considering we are going to go up against persons who will never give up anything of monetary consideration without a fight, who’s up for the battle ahead? All hands on deck?
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