Last week I went to H&R Block and paid them lots of money to deal with my taxes. While it was happening I remembered reading that the total amount of time that Americans spend dealing with their taxes is more hours than General Motors spends annually manufacturing all its cars. I believe it. I’ve already written about a simple way to make all the tax money the government currently gets by a tax system that EVERYONE uses, not just the poor and middle class. In it you only pay taxes on things you buy, and then only on non-essentials. Income itself would be untaxed. As it is now the taxation of income is strictly illegal as many of you know. And as a celebrated lady said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”
We paid the IRS our dollars due and settled down for another year of rising prices and rising taxes, combined with static incomes whose values fall every year.
What do the millionaires in charge of the national economy say about it? Here are a couple of recent quotes from the usual suspects.
Bush in his State of the Union re-run, “ Americans can be confident about our economic growth.” Henry M.Paulsen, Jr., Treasury Secretary,“The U.S. economy is fundamentally strong.” This is the man whose signature is on your 2006 series banknotes. You would think he might know what he was talking about. The millionairess Condoleeza Rice, who has a Chevron oil tanker named after her, says that the U.S. economy is “resilient, its structure sound, and its long-term economic fundamentals are healthy.” For her it probably is.
They must be kidding somebody, maybe themselves, but they aren’t kidding the rest of us. The stock market is NOT the economy. The growth of the economy these people talk about is not the same thing as the health of the economy. Stock prices and the Gross Domestic Product have been going up for years, and the millionaires in the top echelon of society use these numbers to hypnotize everyone else. People like Binder, a former Federal Reserve Board member just don’t understand why recent polls show clearly that ordinary people are not satisfied with the economy. “They are more sour about the economy than the data would seem to warrant,” was a recent comment of his.
His data are the stock market indexes and the GNP. The data of the ordinary people include the price of gas to get to work, the rising cost of getting a kid through college, how to pay the obscene medical bills from the last hospital stay, whether to pay for the drugs or pay the rent, the bill at the checkout counter at the grocery story, the lay-offs to ‘trim the fat’ of a corporation. (The millionaire CEO’s aren’t considered to be the fat.)
These are the realities that do not impact the people at the top, living in well organized bubbles, completely insulated from the everyday world of ordinary people, many of whom have relatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike the people at the top of the financial heap.
But since the 1970’s, when I first came to the States, and I am not to blame for this, the top one tenth of 1% of the wealthy have had astronomical gains in their wealth. The rest of the top 1% has also gained enormous benefits. But 90% of Americans have seen a drop in their real income, which hasn’t even kept up with inflation. Read my article on the Federal Reserve to understand why this is happening.
The median income for a man in his thirties today is 12% LESS than it was thirty years ago. Many men and women are working two jobs just to keep up. Great for family values! Almost everybody here works longer hours than they used to. It works out to about two weeks longer per year than the average of thirty years ago.
And in America it is worse than in other places. Go to Europe and talk to people. You will find that Americans work an average of six weeks more per year, with fewer benefits than the Europeans, and they still can’t keep up with inflation, not to mention medical expenses. Need I mention that the members of Congress have totally free medical care for life? Can we expect these worms to do anything about our medical expenses. Such matters never enter their minds on a day to day basis.
The only answer for many people here has been credit card debt. Consumer debt has risen over 90% in the last decade and now runs at above $2.5 TRILLION. People are using stacked credit cards to pay their mortgages, student loans and medical bills. They are drowning in debt, while the millionaires look at stock prices and the GNP and think everything is just hunky dory.
The polls I mentioned were by CNN and the NYT. The CNN poll found that 60% of people thought that we weren’t heading for a recession, we were already in one. The NYT poll found that 75% polled thought that America was on the wrong track. If this country was a democracy those numbers would be significant. Since it’s not, they are not.
The voice of the people obviously means nothing to the ruling élite. If it did many of them would now be in prison for war crimes. They have the army, the media, Blackwater, the Intelligence data base, the voting machines and the money. Why should they listen to the poor who don’t contribute greatly to their political campaign funds? Not good business.
And now, in desperation, to show willing just before elections, the brainless and leaderless people in charge are giving many of us $600 to spend and they are telling us that this will help stimulate the economy. Anyone who believes that deserves to. First of all, the total amount being distributed comes to $168 billion, and the president has already allotted $50 billion of it to corporations, who apparently desperately need funds to finance their activities in countries where wages are less than here.
While this bill was being passed to give brownie points to people about to run for re-election, the Labor Department reported that 279,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost in 2007. That means that less than 10% of America’s workers are now in manufacturing. This is the lowest percentage since records began. Only an idiot would think that unemployed people are going to be enthusiastic consumers. What is needed, and won’t happen, is that funds should be spent to produce more producers, not more consumers. We can’t shop our way to prosperity. We could produce our way to prosperity.
And so, what is going to happen to that $600? Many people will save that $600, more than they’ve been able to put away for a long time. Others will spend it on the most pressing debt, which will probably benefit only the credit card companies. Those who do buy some consumer items will likely want the best value for their dollar. They will go to places like WalMart. The money won’t benefit America, it will benefit China and the WalMart millionaires.
The idea looks like the idea of a low C average MBA student who got into school because of parental influence, and got his C for the same reason. I remember that his advice to the stricken American citizens after 9/11 was to go shopping. Sounds like the same source to me.
But how does this mental giant spend our money? What is his shopping list? Look at the 2009 Budget, if it can be so-called. Domestic expenditure is just about zero. Health care has been cut. Funds for the Centre for Disease Control have been cut. Programs for low income people have been cut. We already know what he has done to help wounded veterans, wounded because of his lies, he has cut their benefits.
But the money makers have benefited as usual. He wants $515 billion for the Pentagon monster, that’s in addition to the money he’s throwing into the Iraq mess for his friends in Halliburton and Kellog.
Which reminds me, it’s tax time, and many of those bloated corporate budgets don’t get taxed because they just happen to run things in Iraq via subsidiaries in the Caymen Islands. This means that many of the American civilians in Iraq who thought they were working for an American company won’t get W2’s, and won’t be able to get the benefits they thought the company was paying for when they come back to America. The companies benefit by not paying for any benefits. Sleaze all round. Business as usual.
You may have heard of Stiglitz who won a Nobel Prize in economics. He is not a Bush sycophant, and calculated the cost of the first four years of the Bush adventure in Iraq, the REAL cost. This includes deferred interest on the war debt, we aren’t paying for this war with our own money, we are paying for it with interest carrying loans from China. He also included long term care for the wounded soldiers returning home. His average for each DAY of the war in Iraq, in the first four years, was $720 million, per day.
The only Christian organization that I have complete respect for is the American Friends Service Committee. They have calculated different items that $720 million would pay for. Here are some of them:
Providing health care coverage for 424,000 children for a year.
Building 84 new schools.
Buying school lunches for 1.2 million needy kids.
Providing 6,482 units of affordable housing.
Paying for a year of renewable energy electricity in 1.3 million homes.
Paying the salaries of 12,500 new school teachers for a year.
Paying for 35,000 students to go through a four year state college program.
Notice that none of these make any money for the weapons industry, and ours is number one in the world, supplying weapons to anyone with the cash. Perpetual war. Business as usual.
The media aren’t going to tell you what is going on if it adversely affects their advertising budget. They aren’t going to allow the old time journalistic tough questioning of powerful politicians. They are going to fill the air waves with trivia and negativity to divert your attention from the harsh realities. Use other sources. Check on commondreams.org on the Web, or subscribe to The Hightower Lowdown newsletter and its ilk, where fearless and informed people say things that you will never otherwise hear. That’s hightowerlowdown.org of course, as you computer savvy folks would expect.
Happy spending.
