Tag: debt

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Congress returns to Washington, DC this week, and with it returns the debate over the FY2012 budget. Frustrated with the focus on downsizing government and seeing a void of budget proposals that reflect their vision for the country, progressive members of Congress crafted the subject of this week’s 90 Second Summary: The People’s Budget.

With new episodes each Monday, 90 Second Summaries provides simple, concise explanations of bills in front of Congress. This week’s episode focuses upon an alternative to both President Barack Obama’s and Congressman Paul Ryan’s budgets. However, as seems to be the case with any “adult conversation” these days, the Beltway press assumes that progressives will be seated at the kids table.

If nothing else, the People’s Budget represents something radically different from the “austerity” measures proposed by the President and Congressman Ryan. It shatters the conventional wisdom that the only option to fix the deficit is to mangle the social safety net. Yet its exclusion from the greater debate means many Americans will never hear what the proposal is.

While folks online are watching this summary, we will be personally delivering it to targeted offices on Capitol Hill. The People’s Budget was never intended to pass on its own, but rather to influence the debate. Our goal is to make a splash today and increase understanding of the People’s Budget.

Please help us spread word about this week’s episode: The People’s Budget.

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).  His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the US and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

In February 2010 Pollin talked with Paul Jay of The Real News Network and during the interview outlined a careful combination of job-generating public investments, incentives to mobilize private investment, and policies that protect economically vulnerable populations that can create the economic, regulatory and policy environment that Obama could have already been using to create 18 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate to only 4 percent by 2012 – a proposal that has never been given any serious consideration by the Obama administration, policy makers or mainstream media.

Instead the Obama administration chose to continue listening to people like Ben Bernanke whom Obama had re-nominated as Federal Reserve Chairman in August 2009, and who, as the top bank regulator in the country, had played a central role in the creation of the ongoing economic crisis we are experiencing.

In another interview published today, Pollin again talks with Paul Jay discussing Obama’s speech the other day in which he made clear that he is more or less taking on the argument that the big problem is the debt and that austerity for the masses is his plan for reducing it, pointing out that Obama is accepting the notion of the debt being a bigger problem than a recession, that Obama’s premise is “wrong to begin with”, and that:

  There has been a lot of talk about a double-dip recession recently by people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, how to define it, and what it means. What is missing from these discussions is the most obvious question of all: why won’t the economy recover?

  Capitalism is supposed to be self-correcting – or so we’ve been told – and a recession like the one we’ve had is supposed to be that reset button. So why aren’t businesses hiring?

  I’m going to try to answer that question in the simplest way possible.

 There are two primary reasons why the economy isn’t recovering, one reason is cyclical, the other is secular.

“This is an impressive crowd: the Have’s and Have-more’s. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.”

George W. Bush

“It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.”

Margaret Thatcher

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.”

Margaret Bonnano

lest we forget …

  The president had some bold words for the American public earlier this week. He said things that some people didn’t want to hear. He talked about responsibility and sacrifices.

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money, as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation.

 “. . . It’s time to save what we can, spend what we must and live within our means once again.”

– President Obama, 2010

 After saying these bold words he then presented Congress with a plan for the largest deficit in American history. I guess politicians are immune from irony.

This is one of those essays where I’m just going to send you to someone else’s work.

Read it.  Just read it.

I don’t even know where to begin, as far as paraphrasing this, trying to pitch it, whatever.  You just have to read it.

The title tells you the subject matter:

The Military-Industrial Compex is Ruining the Economy

I’ve mentioned this blogger before.  I think he’s brilliant.  I think, in fact, that he’s the best single blogger out there.

(Sorry everybody else).

His stuff is so dense, yet so readable, that it’s even difficult to blockquote.   But I have to try a sample:

As I pointed out in August, public sector spending – and mainly defense spending – has accounted for virtually all of the new job creation in the past 10 years:

The U.S. has largely been financing job creation for ten years. Specifically, as the chief economist for BusinessWeek, Michael Mandel, points out, public spending has accounted for virtually all new job creation in the past 1o years:

Private sector job growth was almost non-existent over the past ten years. Take a look at this horrifying chart:

Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.

It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years. Take a look at this chart:

Perhaps you’ve heard of the movie “The Money Masters” before by Bill Still. But regardless, it is well known that our U.S. Economy is not really getting better — nor will it ever get better.

How could it? That is, until and unless we solve our astronomical debt problem, and stop borrowing money at interest, just to pay off the never ending massive pile of interest from our old debts — all of which can never go away under our existing system because the very creation of money itself is also debt generating ( as the crooked Federal Reserve System was designed [Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans]).

Some people, namely Ron Paul, have talked about a return to a Gold & Silver based monetary system.  But this solution, while constructive for discussion, would appear to be incomplete. For we see even today that the price of Gold and Silver are greatly manipulated in a corrupt manner by the various Central Banks, the IMF, and various Governments. Therefore, how could either Gold or Silver possibly offer any stability when it is itself under the domination and control of “The Money Masters“?  For example, given that size of the U.S. Money Supply has quadrupled in just the last few years alone, it would then logically follow that the correct price of Gold relative to the watered-down U.S. Dollar should already be in the vicinity of $5000/OZ.