The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Tax and Spend or....

Tax and Spend or....

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, November 10 2008, 21:04:32 (CET)
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Borrow and spend. Repubs make a big deal out of Dems supposedly taxing and spending. Repubs also like to spend...in fact they’ve spent us into the biggest deficit ever. The difference is that Repubs don’t like getting the money from their own and everybody else’s pockets...they prefer to borrow it. Which means it winds up costing even more eventually...because of interest. But it gets them elected, so screw us all.

All politicians like to spend and that’s what government is about. The issue is where do you get the money from? From the people who want the services or from banks who want the business? We all wind up paying anyway...only with Repubs we defer the principle and consign ourselves and our children to paying interest almost forever. Because it never stops....the next year and the next we have to borrow more and more...and more and more of what taxes we pay go to pay the interest on all the loans so in spite of trillions of dollars we still can’t afford health care and better schools etc...because too much of the budget is committed to paying interest...so what do we do? Borrow more, of course.

Repubs have a major when appealing for votes. They represent the wealthy and those who want desperately to get wealthy. And since legitimate ways of doing that are diminishing and besides people haven’t much spare change to buy new goods and services, increasingly the only way to make gobs of fast money is through some sort of shenanigans...and one good one is war...and defense. Except you need believable villains, like Commies and now Terrorists. Another path is to gut regulations...so entrepreneurs can put melamine in milk and fertilizer...and all the other ways there are to “get government off your back”. This is the Repub method...but they come out and say it because not enough people will buy into it. So, you have to trick them...that’s what those “think tanks” actually do...dream up ways to fool people.

You need an outside threat plus, preferably, a sinister enemy-among-us. Acting pious and religious of course is a great boon. Then you need something clever and ridiculous like “trickle down”...or “piss on you”. You have to convince people that their best interests lie in letting the rich get richer and expecting the excess to slop over onto you. People forget that taxes provide goods and services that benefit our lives in ways which individuals couldn’t afford to do for themselves. Europeans pay more taxes but they get a hell of a lot of value for it....in things like health care and education and even culture. We think that with a few hundred dollars more a year we can pay for health care, college for the kids and other services. We can’t, obviously, but it SOUNDS good. “No socialism for us, by God”! Except the bankers and stock brokers, having bankrupted themselves in their games, have to come to stupid old us to bail them out. And in a few years time, we’ll forget and get swept up again in visions of “free markets” and “rising tides” and lower taxes, so we can REALLY spend.

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