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GOLDBRICKERS – It’s easier to not care about jobs when you already have one.
Tea Partiers often cite the inability to cut budgets through the bone and still run the government on drill baby, drill fumes as a cruel thing to foist on future generations. While we need to cut expenses, the more important task is creating jobs with livable wages – not the French frying legion of Rick Perry’s Clown Star economic miracle nor the too-small-to-live businesses so poorly run and under-capitalized they can’t afford to pay them.
As the OWS uprising shows, 99 Percenters are fed up with economic policies that benefit the few at debilitating cost to the many. New polls show the even the 99 percent are in the throes of economic balkanization among themselves. The income disparity between subgroups that help define the 99% and America’s greatest contribution to the global economy – a sustainable middle class - show a clear and present danger that taxes will be the least of the next generation’s worries.
The 1 Percenters argue that pillaging the economy to fuel an ever-growing income disparity will keep the middle class vibrant. Like most of their decisions, their greed blinds them to their folly. Just as you can’t collect taxes from people without income, you can’t sell things to people with no money. They believe mushrooms can sprout from the cow flop of their bad ideas. They think they can get richer off people who can’t even buy the fertilizer to make the flop indefinitely without seeing what they’re doing to themselves.
We need a flood of economic benefit to all, not some feeble Reaganesque trickle. The idea that trickling works defies logic and belief. We’ve been trickling for decades and the only thing that’s changed is a massive wealth redistribution leading to the collapse of the middle class. Yes, we may be willing higher taxes on future generations, but we’re willing even bigger despair and woe to them.
There’s only one bright spot in our lead-lined cloud. Through their audacious greed and self-interest the 1% is strangling itself faster than they’re garroting the middle class. When no one has a proverbial pot, we’ll finally be made into a 100% economy – albeit one that will be a damned economic wasteland with nothing to do but start all over again.
That’s the sort of hope that is our toxic inheritance to our future.
Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!
1 Comment
“The 1 Percenters argue that pillaging the economy to fuel an ever-growing income disparity will keep the middle class vibrant. Like most of their decisions, their greed blinds them to their folly. Just as you can’t collect taxes from people without income, you can’t sell things to people with no money.”
Although, you can do things like force people to buy private health insurance from a handful of big companies. The top 1% can also invest in vital utilities like water, and in lucrative government contracts, including privatized prisons, privately run homeless shelters (so the top 1% can continue to make money off the 99% even when they’re bank accounts have been emptied and they’re booted into the streets), and let’s not forget private mercenaries and other elements of the military industrial complex.
I’m not saying we should all give up and be hopeless, but I think this article has too much naive optimism. The top 1% has been waging class warfare against us, and winning, for decades at least. The two parties have no significant distinctions aside from rhetoric, and the top 1% feels invincible. We need to work hard to achieve a just society, and I think telling us the equivalent of the old adage that giving our adversary enough rope and they’ll hang themselves is simply not helpful.