Here's food for thought: what motivates Congressmen (mostly on the right) to insist on cutting items in the budget that would help people directly, like promoting environmental protection, expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits, raising the minimum wage to livable levels, providing a federal job guarantee, fighting homelessness, and more? They'd get my vote. The reasons they always give: "We can't afford it. Inflation would spike." (Usually untrue.) The real reason: "We must vote as our corporate sponsors' demand, or we'll lose election funding and may lose our jobs."
Here's the "worse than wrong" part, the reason their corporate sponsors demand that their minions push for austerity budgets that will cut funding for social-benefit programs like the ones above. It's not to be "fiscally responsible," because those same sponsors are fine with military budgets in excess of what the military asks for, which are now as untouchable as Social Security and Medicare benefits used to be. Our military spends more on war preparations and materiel (er, "defense") than the next ten countries combined, and in the war category, as Dick Cheney scolded his colleagues, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."
To hold that "deficit spending is fiscally irresponsible" in the human needs and infrastructure sectors, while simultaneously holding that such spending is not only responsible but critically necessary for an already-bloated war budget is intellectually dishonest. It's also morally bankrupt, as such a budget kills more people than war does when people are foreclosed from getting what they need to survive in the social sector–in jobs, housing, debt relief, education, and health care.
Why, you might ask, do the billionaire corporate owners of Congress wish to cause suffering among the non-rich while lavishing ever more riches on our war machine? By doing so, they enrich themselves twice: once from their war investments and once more by raising unemployment, homelessness, and bankruptcy which all depress wages, increasing their profits. It's not cruelty, they tell themselves, it's just the American way of business. (More intellectual dishonesty, worthy of a Mafia Don.)
Meanwhile, as a pundit recently wrote, "As renewables start to overtake fossil fuels in the United States, the GOP is fighting to reverse that progress: House Republicans are sticking to their proposal to only agree to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts that include most of the clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ signature legislative achievement this term."
The "debt ceiling" is not so much a "law" as a procedural rule. It's often been ignored when it's stood in the way of right-wing-favored budget items (like anything military or profitable for the war industry), and it's a peculiar institution currently in use by only one other nation, Denmark. Yet, asked by a reporter if it should be abolished, Biden responded "No, that would be irresponsible." Really? the US and Denmark are the only "responsible" nations? Sounds very "Republican," does it not? Remember the seldom-mentioned reassurance Biden gave to a private group of rich campaign contributors that if he were elected, "nothing will fundamentally change." A promise made, a promise kept.
Our current Speaker of the House (Kevin McCarthy), in a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcjMxEc4Qnk) explains what our path forward must be, as if he were guiding his teenage son in "responsible economics," thusly (text of paragraphs 1 to 4 below were taken verbatim from the closed-captions of the YouTube link above):
(1) “If you gave your child a credit card, and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn’t just raise the credit limit, you’d sit down with them, and help them to figure out where they could cut back on spending.
(2) "The same thing is true of our national debt.
(3) "We are spending more than we take in. And in the last couple of years, it has gotten really out of control. We must change our spending habits or we will leave the next generation with a bill they cannot afford.
(4) "Now is the time for a responsible debt limit, before it’s too late.”
Anyone who truly understands how our current federal financing works (aka the "MMT-wise") knows this narrative is beyond bunk, it's gaslighting to profit the 1%, damn the collateral damage to everyone else. Taking this toxic trash one sentence at a time:
1) This Dad-to-Son dialogue is relevant to raising a child to live within his or her means (ignoring who’s funding the credit card, and why), but only in the context of household finance (or even state government, where McCarthy cut his political teeth)—but in the context of federal finance, it's not just irrelevant but it’s just plain wrong.
2) "The same thing is true of our national debt." Totally false and either a) deliberately misleading, if Kevin is a competent federal legislator, or b) a bald-faced lie in service to his own portfolio and his kleptocrat sponsors if he knows the first thing about federal finance.
3) "We are spending more than we take in..." Again, nonsense in the federal context. As the sole legal ISSUER of our currency, "we" (Congress) spends nothing. It issues new money for every allocation of funds; nearly all that the federal government "takes in" is in the form of taxes, which *fund nothing*—they are deleted on receipt, primarily to control inflation. Sure, we should tax the rich as they were taxed in the Eisenhower years (look it up), not to "raise funds" but to reduce today's obscene wealth inequality, which is far greater today than it was in the "gilded age" of the "robber barons." "...We must change our spending habits or we will leave the next generation with a bill they cannot afford." Spending "habits?" like always getting our java drinks at Starbucks instead of at 7/11? The worst spending "habits" of Congress are rewarding the Military with more funds than they ask for, never asking for an audit to find where the missing Trillion$ went, spending more per year than the military budgets of the ten next-biggest-spending countries on the planet *combined,* without a murmur about deficits or "fiscal responsibility.” If it kills, it's sacred and not to be questioned. And if we don't change these irresponsible spending habits, "we will leave the next generation with a bill they cannot afford." Ahem. No generation gets a bill from the previous one's "spending" (Congressional appropriations). They may reap the whirlwind from the wind their fathers sowed, as our children may inherit disappearing islands, receding coastlines, extreme droughts and floods, poisoned land, food, air and water, climate refugees, homelessness, unemployment, hunger, and disease, at an incalculable economic and human cost. How will the next generations handle the legacy we're in the process of leaving them? Will they ever be able to "pay that bill?"
4) Kevin, what would that "responsible debt limit" look like? Ask any Fed Chairman ever about "federal debt," and they will tell you that it's a number on a spreadsheet, always balanced to the penny by funds added to the accounts of the recipients of Congressional appropriations. Congress never has to borrow from China or anywhere else, or from existing programs, for funds it creates at will. It's restricted only by real resources—natural and human—in the real economy, not by arbitrary numbers in a budget. Ever wonder why there are two sets of budgetary "rules" in Congress—one for military "spending," another for everything else (you know, that "promote the general welfare" stuff)? Just ask "Deep Throat"—Follow The Money. Congress does what its kleptocrat sponsors tell it to do. Don't look to "Democrats" to save us from the Red Team of the duopoly. A reporter recently asked President Biden if it's time to abolish the "debt ceiling," as Australia did recently— leaving only two other countries with this peculiar brand of "financial responsibility"—us and Holland. His response? "That would be fiscally irresponsible."
Who can save us from this madness, so that we may avoid the coming "bi-partisan," self-inflicted apocalypse? Look in the mirror, my friends. I was a young teenager when Ike was president. He told a meeting of a Woman's Club, "If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power." Let's face it, our "two parties" are two teams of corporate lobbyists paid to put on a pageant so we can convince ourselves we have a choice. There's no law that says a candidate must belong to any party. There must be good, competent men and women to choose from who can be new, party-free standard bearers willing to lead from behind, ones we can trust to truly represent us, to champion causes that are right and that are moral. The ones you choose will not be career politicians out for power, fame, and wealth, but those willing to harness the nation's near-limitless resources to restore sanity to public life, to perform feats like the leaders of the "greatest generation" did when they defeated the Axis powers and built the largest, most prosperous middle class in history. We did it then and we can do it again. The stakes are even higher now than they were then, and the rewards will be astounding. If we fail, as seems likely on a bad day, we may not recover from our current slide into ecological, social, economic, and political disaster. We need a team like the one with the "right stuff" that got us to the moon and back. I don't know who they are, but their names will not be Biden, Trump, Bezos, or Musk.
Perhaps they could call themselves "the Responsible Party." (Look for that title in an upcoming post.)
