The stimulus bills and bailouts are difficult to defend as anything but a disaster, or at best of minimal impact when considering the dollars spent. Ronald Reagan once said of our Federal government, “We could say they spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money.” This is not an exaggeration today.
Such binges are at the point of addiction, and like any addict, they readily resort to theft wherever they can get away with it. Thanks to movements like the Tea Party, challenging and replacing posts in Congress from both Democrats and Republicans, legislators know they can’t get away with raising taxes across the board. Republicans speak to the shrinking masses who still believe they can share in the American Dream through hard work in a Free Market, even when in fact they are beholden to forces within such Market that skew the playing field in favor of the few. Liberals are used to playing appeasement, minimizing or sidestepping their equally vast, corporate and millionaire interests, which includes unions, disguised like them as “for the people” in the same way.
But when the going gets tough, the winners get blamed.
Not so simple math apparently.
It is only natural in such a fiscal crisis that the Progressive agenda focuses not on the excesses of government — which it no longer apologizes for its desire to perpetuate — but to go after the rich. They accuse the Right of playing the Class Warfare card, rejecting that label of such policies even though it is very much an honest interpretation. President Obama recently said, “It’s not class warfare, it’s simple math.”
Class warfare or not, his grades in math should probably stay out of public record. Or perhaps it’s common sense he lacks, if he even believes what he is saying. No matter what it is, it’s a distraction from the REAL math problem. You can’t spend money you don’t have. Either you get more money in or spend less. Simple math. But what Obama and the Democrats are NOT telling us is that the amount overspent is far more than any tax increase to any class of people.
In fact, almost everything we spend is borrowed.
We need to do the math — not Obama’s math, but a real comparison between expenditures and income, and more importantly, the expenditures versus real value and assets. A small slice of the budget could feed and immunize the whole planet for a year, or colonize the moon in ten. In theory, every American could have medical care, housing, and a flying car. I’m not saying we should do these things necessarily, but for what we’re spending, that would be reasonable to show for it.
It’s more than simple math. It’s common sense. And common sense says that if you are already spending enough to solve or at least significantly address nearly every problem in the world, then taxation and debt isn’t the problem. The government and country ran just fine at a tiny fraction of the budget before WWII, and a tiny fraction of that before the Great Depression. We still built roads, delivered the mail, and defended the borders.
The same goes for the military. If we can’t use the vastest war machine in history to squeltch a pissant crew like Al Qaeda after a decade of hole-hunting, a hundred thousand more troops and billions of dollars in drones isn’t the answer. In fact, things are worse the harder we try, and not just militarily, but in economy, education, and in terms of health costs. THIS is simple math, verifyable though the CBO and any other objective data.
But maybe if we tax the rich just a little more …