Now there are a couple things I want to point out.
- If I hear one more person (politician or just registered republican) say that someone needs to get Obama's out of control spending under control, I'm going to start carrying printouts of this graph with me to hand out. Many of the GOP members you'll hear spouting this crap are the very ones who rubber-stamped (and in some cases even co-wrote) some of the laws which resulted in many of the larger segments on the left side of the graph (*cough* Boehner *cough*).
- I also hear these people talk about how "un-American" Obama is. This is a president who surged in Afghanistan, launched a global drone war, killed Osama Bin Laden and much of the al Qaeda's leadership, dethroned Qaddafi, shored up alliances in India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan, and finally ended the Iraq war but he hates America?
- Not to bring us all back to High School Civics but the president doesn't spend money. Congress does. So it's a little silly to argue that Obama's on a spending spree. It's true that the president can help set the spending agenda for Congress, but that pretty much applies when he's got a majority there. I think we can all agree that Obama hasn't been able to get much of any spending done since 2010. Almost every bit of spending you see on his side occurred prior to then. He also hasn't been able to get any saving done either. If you consider stalemate progress, you're what's wrong with this country at this point. An economy that's stalled needs movement, not frozen politicians.
- Forgetting about the contentious issue of the two wars, I want you to imagine a world where the Bush tax cuts never happened. Just look at the bar on the left, take that chunk out in your mind and slide what's below it upward. Can you see how much better shape we'd be in fiscally? Try to find a blob of equal size on Obama's side. I'll wait. There is a good sized one over there for Stimulus Spending but Bush has one the same size for Stimulus spending. And let's not forget TARP and bailouts that BUSH enacted.
- Then there's the $126 billion in defense spending savings on Obama's side. Go ahead and look for any black on Bush's side. I'll wait.
The argument in favor of the Bush tax cuts goes like this: Keep giving the wealthy tax breaks so that they will bless us with jobs. When we have jobs, we'll spend money which will make businesses invest more which will bring more jobs and the circle of joy will know no end. Here's the problem with this theory: It didn't work. The Bush tax cuts have been in place for years, the wealthy have made more money than they ever have in history as a result, wage inequality is as high as it's been in decades, taxes on the wealthy haven't been this low in my lifetime, yet where are the jobs? Overseas. Let me be succinct. The wealthy don't give a shit about this country. What they do care about is money. The more they can make the better. It's a competition with their country club neighbors and has little to do with lifestyle. So if they can move their factory to China and get the labor done for 1/3 of the price, that's more money in their pockets. They sell the crap they're making to 2nd world countries who are on the rise.
See, America? We're like the once hot girlfriend that's gotten a few wrinkles and put on a few pounds. Now our wealthy have a new girlfriend. She's younger and a bit more naive so she doesn't have things like pesky labor laws or expensive infrastructures to maintain. She doesn't care that her children work in sweat shops or that mortality rates are high.
And the wealth-sponsored Fox News line that is brainwashed into the republican masses is this: Well you see, the lower income families pay no taxes. The wealthy would gladly pay more if they felt everyone was paying their fair share. Billionaire Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman thinks these people have no skin in the game. I think Matt Taibbi said it best so I'll just quote him here (my emphasis added):
[O]ut of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street. And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.
You tell me how a group of thinking adults - most of which have mortgages and are in the threatened middle class - can swallow the line from republicans that the real problem here is Obama. This Jedi mind trick from Fox News is working on a population that is so busy keeping it's head above water that it doesn't have time to stop, think, and analyze what's really going on. It's like the guy who's picking your pocket using your millisecond long attention span to distract you while he does it. Don't fall for it. It is time to wake up. These people do not have consciences. They are not going to "do the right thing" for America. They are going to milk this country of every resource and every dime until we're broke, drinking dirty water, and breathing polluted air, and then they'll move into their multi-million dollar compounds with private security while we all kill each other for a chicken breast. The oil that keeps the machinery moving in America is the middle class. It represents opportunity to the lower class and stability for those who have no aspirations of being wealthy. When the middle class is gone, hope goes with it and when that happens, we're going to see anarchy that makes the occupy Wall Street protests look like Gandhi gatherings.
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