Does Senator Conrad really think this pronouncement will help Democrats win elections, much less help the country?
Speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Conrad said Americans and politicians have to realize that Medicare and Social Security can’t remain the same.
Social Security and Medicare aren’t the problem. The problem is tax cuts for the rich, the greatest inequality between those at the top and everyone else in income and net worth ever, and the stranglehold large corporations have on our government.
Some commentators blame recent legislation — the stimulus bill and the financial rescues — for today’s record deficits. Yet those costs pale next to other policies enacted since 2001 that have swollen the deficit. Those other policies may be less conspicuous now, because many were enacted years ago and they have long since been absorbed into CBO’s and other organizations’ budget projections.
Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).
America’s wealth and power arose because we had a strong vibrant large middle class and a safety net in place in the form of social security and medicare and other government programs that helped people buy homes, pay for college tuition for their children, clean up our air and water (reducing public health costs), keep our food safe, financial regulation that made our markets the most stable and trusted in the world, Labor laws that protected the rights of unions and individual workers, etc.
Those used to be Democratic Party accomplishment of which Democrats were proud and that they defended. Not anymore, apparently.
Destroying that safety net and making the middle class small enough to drown in a bathtub is a recipe for disaster, both in the short and long terms. You want a libertarian paradise? Go to Somalia. You want lack of regulation of major corporations? See what that has done to the environment and health of the people of China, India and Russia.
In relative terms the deficit is significantly lower than it was after WWII, the period that jump started America’s rise as the most dominant economic force on the planet. Yet after WWII, instead of demanding reparations and other financially punitive measures, we used our economic strength and targeted foreign aid to build up the economies of our former enemies and a devastated Europe. That spending created the global economy that we have today which reduced much suffering, even if it did not eliminate all global inequities.
So what should we be doing instead of trying to fight off the dangerous proposals of politicians like Senator Conrad? We should be investing in our future through targeted spending on education, infrastructure and new technologies. We should have a single payer health care plan for all Americans to save money and increase the competitiveness of our businesses vis-a-vis the rest of the developed world. We should be doing what we can to bring high paying jobs back to America. We should be strengthening our unions to the same level as in Germany (whose economy is doing better than ours at the moment), and making our corporations (especially polluters and Wall Street) more accountable for the damage they have done, not less.
That is what other nations are doing or have done. This is what we successfully did to save our automotive industry when Wall Street and the GOP wanted to let it die. This is what we should be doing more of rather than considering “austerity measures” that have never proven to be successful when applied, except to bail out the debt investments of the upper classes.
US economic growth is slowing faster than expected with confidence waning in the face of austerity measures. Spending cuts in Europe are also hitting investment confidence, according to Neil Dwane, chief investment officer Europe at RCM, a company of Allianz Global Investors.
‘We can still see a two tier global economy in place, with the over banked, overstressed developed world continuing to struggle to make headway, whilst the emerging markets likely to continue to deliver reasonably robust economic growth,’ he said.
‘It is quite clear inside the US that, apart from the activity being undertaken by President Obama and Ben Bernanke, the US states themselves have already entered quite a serious degree of austerity. We are reading about policemen losing their jobs, schools and hospitals being closed and in California they are now paying you with IOUs that are only worth 88% of the dollar bill written on the cheque when you take them to the bank,’ he pointed out. […]
‘Countries like Ireland are beginning to show how hard it is, even if you are putting the most effective economic policy in place, to help the economy to recover. They are truly in a paradox of thrift at the moment where the more they save and implement sound economic policy, the more their economy continues to shrink. This may be a foretaste of what the future holds for Spain, Italy and for Greece,’ he added.
Our federal deficit isn’t the issue, though I agree that the amount of wasteful government spending increased thanks to the increased privatization of government functions by Republican administrations which led to massive fraud by government contractors, most recently during the reign of George W. Bush. The issue, as Paul Krugman constantly reminds us is lack of demand for goods and services, a demand that only Government can create at this point in time. Because anyone who thinks the Federal Reserve’s plan to keep giving Big Banks essentially free money is going to stimulate demand is smoking some Grade A ganga.
So how did Democrats fail to understand that policies of which Herbert Hoover would have approved are the worst thing for helping both their party and our country? Specifically, when did Kent Conrad turn into Ron Paul?
Inquiring minds want to know. Because if this is the Democrats idea of winning back the House and retaining the Presidency, trust me, it won’t work.
