The U.S. economy is currently thrashing about like a dying beast, and at the moment, all attention is focused on what the hell can be done to save it. Or if, in fact, it can be saved. Or for that matter, if it is even worth saving or if it should be left to die to see what comes up in its place.
I think it’s important to take a step back here and look at what this really means from a political standpoint, in particular what it says about Republican economics. Wall Street right now is nothing more than a microcosm of what the U.S. economy has become under Republican policy. And what is happening right now is a precursor of what is to come for the greater U.S. economy if something isn’t done before it’s too late.
The primary issues these financial companies have boil down to 1) there is just too much bad debt out there and 2) nobody really knows exactly how much bad debt everyone else has. This causes the trust to break down between them to the point that it kills the exchanges of capital that are necessary to keep day to day operations running.
Sound familiar? For decades now the Republicans have been telling us that budget deficits don’t matter because the national debt is irrelevant. And so, we’ve accumulated 10 trillion dollars in debt that, for all the world knows, we may never be able (or even intend) to pay back.
Additionally, the accounting tricks and monetary legerdemain practiced by these large financial companies aren’t all that original. They were invented by the U.S. government! Want to run a war, but not have it look bad on your fiscally conservative cred? Don’t include it in the budget, just pay for it with supplementals! Brilliant.
Right now the failure of Republican economic policies have been revealed on Wall Street for even the most casual observer to see, but these policies haven’t just been in practice on Wall Street – they’ve run rampant all over the U.S. budget as well. This is the perfect opportunity to point this out. If we shout this loud and clear enough, maybe we can start trying to fix what is wrong with the U.S. government’s spending practices, and shove these batshit insane Republican economics back under the rock from which they came.