There is no budget crisis

There is no Budget Crisis according to Robert Reich. It is a carefully concocted conservative lie to frame the debate in a way to get their insidious budget cuts. They have everyone believing that if we pass the debt ceiling deadline we won’t be able to meet our financial obligations. Even Obama and the Dems have fallen for this and are therefore tacitly playing into the conservative game plan. They did this by linking the budget deficit to the debt limit when they have no relationship according to Reich.

Reich grants that the percentage of debt to the overall economy is high but the remedy for this is not cutting spending on government programs but the reverse: investing in creating jobs by doing the following, for example: “exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes this year and next, recreating a WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, creating an infrastructure bank, providing tax incentives for small businesses to hire, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.”

But of course this is not part of the conservative agenda, which is to gut government while privatizing as much of their functions as possible, since so doing further enriches those at the top of the food chain and further emasculates the rest of us, which is as it should be in their Darwinian worldview. Crippling government by cutting money to social programs kills both bird with the same stone and they know it and have the skill to spin it as a spending problem which is the working premise by everyone.

I am reminded of Michael Moore’s excellent blog post “American is not broke.” There is plenty of money but it’s concentrated in the hands of the banks, oil companies and ultra-rich. Like Reich he sees the way out of the budgetary problem is to fairly tax those at the top and to create jobs. And creating jobs relies heavily on investing in education, one of the very things that is instead being eviscerated on the tax chopping block. For well-educated folks are the “inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet,” i.e., these are the real job creators. Not the speculative bankers that not only produce vast wealth for themselves but destroy jobs in the process. And like Reich Moore is well aware that they get away with it because they control the spin through the media.

Another one in this choir is George Lakoff. Recall this blog post wherein he made clear that all this budget deficit nonsense is a highly crafted ruse for one purpose: to disable union financial support of liberal candidates and causes, which is one of the few large contributors left for this constituency. And the likes of Rove are quite skilled in framing the unions as drains on the economy, even the cause of the budget deficits, what with all those demands for workplace safety and decent wages and pensions. Imagine the gall of those workers! They should be glad they even have a job in this decrepit economy that we, the rich, of course created so that they won’t fight back when we rape them even further into submission.

Don’t be fooled my friends into buying this bullshit pie. Stand up and let your voices be heard loud and clear. Quit taking money out of our hands and giving it to the wealthy. Quit manufacturing not jobs but crises to scare us into submission. The more we name and fight their fabricated demons the less power they have and the closer we come to returning our nation to a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.