"Over the past weeks and months the President repeatedly called for substantial deficit reduction through both long-term entitlement changes and revenues through tax reform, with additional measures to spark jobs and strengthen our recovery," U.S. Press Secretary, Jay Carney .
Demint and Boehner recently called for President Obama to axe Tresurey Secretary Tim Geithner over the decision of S&P to downgrade the United States credit rating from a AAA to an AA+. The rhetoric runs the usual narrative, the GOP accusing the Obama administration of holding on to "entitlement programs" and restricting private enterprise from creating new jobs. Unfortunately the facts show a President far to willing to compromise. Most liberals are pulling their collective hair out over the Presidents unwillingness to call out the stubborn Tea Party fundamentalists, who have arguably been holding the government hostage for a very small portion of the United States population.
Perhaps President Obama is practicing the ideal form of pragmatism championed by William James and John Dewey the Presidents fellow Chicagoan; or maybe he is embracing the realpolitik that defined a once mighty conservative GOP party. Through the mud slinging, most of America is well aware of the inability of our current congressional leaders to get the job done. Perhaps much of the fault lies in the Tea Party and GOP's recent fad in swearing (false?) oaths before a, thankfully, merciful god. Many of the oaths simply reaffirm the fundamentalist conservative ideology that embody the oath takers, creating an orgy of religious and political fervor.
The arguably neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama wrote "But of all the ways to make distinctions between people and classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and most apt to add isolation to inequality. Tax exemption was the most hated of all privileges." Fukuyama was writing of pre-French Revolution societies from China to the Middle East to Europe. Taxation is a practice as old as capitalism, if not its progenitor. Yet ironically, it is the GOP and the Tea Party that demand the class war in revoking nearly all taxes for corporations and the upper 5-10% of society. The idea that pumping capital into those who not only have the means for their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, can only last in a society that is demanding an evolution in its approach to government economics.
In the end, the GOP and specifically the Tea Party congress men and women who jeered for the United States to default, understood the risk. The millions of Americans that would suffer from the collapse of "entitlement programs" at the behest of a default in the national economy, would simply cower further to the corporate oligarchs that finance our semi-public elections. Those congress persons who jeered, would be fine within their small homogeneous districts. (see: gerrymandering)
In the end, the International Business Times had the best point "The biggest mistake, or the factor that most contributed to S&P's downgrade of the U.S. Government was the 2001 Bush Income Tax Cut. The $1.35 trillion tax cut -- a tax cut that many economists and policy professionals felt was not necessary from a stimulus standpoint, given that the U.S. economy was already recovering from the mini 2001 recession -- instantaneously turned a U.S. Government budget surplus into a budget deficit. You read correctly: President Bill Clinton, D-Ark., in fiscal 2001 -- the Clinton administration's last fiscal year -- was the last president to run a budget surplus: the Clinton administration notched a $127.3 billion surplus in fiscal 2001 -- the fourth consecutive year of surpluses. "
Hopefully the next round of Presidential and the following midterm elections, will give way to another opportunity for America's growth under strong Democratic leadership
No comments:
Post a Comment