Both President Joe Biden and House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have stated publicly that the U.S. will not default. They are negotiating over the budget. For my part, I’ve started to wonder if the whole debt ceiling crisis isn’t about Republicans’ determination to cut taxes for the wealthy at all costs.
“Leaving the White House today, McCarthy told reporters that he would not entertain rolling back the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. ‘[T]he problem is not revenue,’ he insisted. ‘The problem is spending.’”
Is McCarthy (et al.) being disingenuous or is he just plain dumb? There is NO DIFFERENCE between “revenue” and “spending” when you’re talking about government. There’s even a specific term economists use for tax cuts/carve-outs/loopholes/giveaways; they’re called, “tax expenditures.” Meaning, when you give someone--an individual, perhaps, or a corporation, or any entity--a break on taxes, it’s the same as if you handed them (“spent”) money from the US government. These people are cosplaying Marie Antoinette and her famous line, “Let them eat cake.” And we all know how that ended up for here.
Since the last election many Americans have thought the greatest lie was Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him by the Democratic Party. That lie has lived for the past 2 plus years.
It does not even come close to being the biggest lie ever told in American politics.
The “WINNER’ for that is over 40 years old, was coined by Ronald Regan: “trickle down economics”, and has cost this country and its taxpayers more than any other lie!
Come on GOP man up and admit what you all know is true.
Regrettably, when Democrats hold the White House, Republicans, particularly since 2010, largely have viewed the debt ceiling “as a hostage worth taking.” I expect, were the country to default, the economic calamity that would ensue would be pinned on Biden. Moreover, I believe the call for savage cuts to Medicaid, to housing, to the environment, to childcare, to education, and so forth is aimed at destroying the ability of government in a democratic society to provide for its people. Accordingly, I agree with Senator Bernie Sanders who asserts Republicans want to make this country even more of a corporatist society wherein the only Americans empowered in economic decision-making are large multi-national corporates.
Currently, unless dynamics I’m unaware of are at work behind closed doors, I see no recourse but for Biden to invoke the 14th and pay the nation’s bills while litigation ensues.
"A 2020 study by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans."
The raison d'etre of the modern bought and paid for Republican Party. And it's not just the dramatic upswing in how financial inequality has skyrocketed; the the way "Reaganomic" financial asymmetry means that creeps such as Elon Musk gain ever more control and impact on our politics, our society and our lives, and they are no longer shy about talking about it. How close did we come, how close are we now to losing democracy entirely? Billionaires openly defy the law, and way too often get away with it.
The Republican Party of the Civil War and the Republican Party of today have nothing in common beyond a name. The party today is composed of the traitors and seditionists of the New Confederacy, and they should be dealt with the way we should have dealt with their traitor forebears, of which my patriot ancestors didn't kill enough of them when the opportunity presented itself.
I am pessimistic that the debt ceiling crisis will be resolved before a default occurs. The Democrats have not messaged this well--the amount of wealth transferred out of the bottom 90% to the top 1% is OBSCENE and that has not gotten out in the media. The problem is a TAX (REVENUE) problem and not a JUST A SPENDING problem as the Republicans claim.
I occasionally work in the snack bar at my kid’s school. The kids of the parents who work there get free snacks when their parents are working. The other day, I watched as my co-worker’s kid came behind the counter and grabbed snacks for not only himself but their whole friend group, including several of the coveted and scarce just baked cookies. This while a line of kids whose parents don’t or can’t work in the snack bar (or just weren’t working that day) waited in line hoping to get and then to pay for those same cookies. But if you were to ask the kids in line why they didn’t get a cookie, they would blame the kid in front of them who bought 2 cookies or the kid who cut or the kitchen staff who didn’t make enough cookies. They would never have seen the raid that was carried out while they were jockeying for position and then trying desperately to hold their position in that line. This is how privilege works.
I wish Biden had agreed to enter negotiations with McCarthy ONLY if tax increases on the wealthy and corporations remain. No discussion about any cuts of any kind without that guarantee.
The mass cruelty and mean-spiritedness in the Republican Party right now is incomprehensible.
Raise taxes on the wealthy. Tax the wealthy to death, if possible. Remove the income cap on an individual's salary payments into Social Security, so Social Security is solvent forever. Increase discretionary spending. Forgive all student debt.
"Faced in 1861 with funding the Civil War, members of the Republican Party invented the U.S. income tax and graduated it to make sure that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senator William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it."
Only one of many respects that the nominally "Republican Party" seems the antithesis of the Republican Party of Lincoln.
I explained the current debt crisis to my kids and wife using this analogy and they found it helpful-
The Rs and Ds are like a husband and wife who spend more than they make and their way of deciding how to agree on future spending is to not pay their upcoming bank payment.
May 23, 2023
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
___Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Leaving the White House today, McCarthy told reporters that he would not entertain rolling back the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. ‘[T]he problem is not revenue,’ he insisted. ‘The problem is spending.’”
Is McCarthy (et al.) being disingenuous or is he just plain dumb? There is NO DIFFERENCE between “revenue” and “spending” when you’re talking about government. There’s even a specific term economists use for tax cuts/carve-outs/loopholes/giveaways; they’re called, “tax expenditures.” Meaning, when you give someone--an individual, perhaps, or a corporation, or any entity--a break on taxes, it’s the same as if you handed them (“spent”) money from the US government. These people are cosplaying Marie Antoinette and her famous line, “Let them eat cake.” And we all know how that ended up for here.
Since the last election many Americans have thought the greatest lie was Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him by the Democratic Party. That lie has lived for the past 2 plus years.
It does not even come close to being the biggest lie ever told in American politics.
The “WINNER’ for that is over 40 years old, was coined by Ronald Regan: “trickle down economics”, and has cost this country and its taxpayers more than any other lie!
Come on GOP man up and admit what you all know is true.
Regrettably, when Democrats hold the White House, Republicans, particularly since 2010, largely have viewed the debt ceiling “as a hostage worth taking.” I expect, were the country to default, the economic calamity that would ensue would be pinned on Biden. Moreover, I believe the call for savage cuts to Medicaid, to housing, to the environment, to childcare, to education, and so forth is aimed at destroying the ability of government in a democratic society to provide for its people. Accordingly, I agree with Senator Bernie Sanders who asserts Republicans want to make this country even more of a corporatist society wherein the only Americans empowered in economic decision-making are large multi-national corporates.
Currently, unless dynamics I’m unaware of are at work behind closed doors, I see no recourse but for Biden to invoke the 14th and pay the nation’s bills while litigation ensues.
"A 2020 study by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans."
The raison d'etre of the modern bought and paid for Republican Party. And it's not just the dramatic upswing in how financial inequality has skyrocketed; the the way "Reaganomic" financial asymmetry means that creeps such as Elon Musk gain ever more control and impact on our politics, our society and our lives, and they are no longer shy about talking about it. How close did we come, how close are we now to losing democracy entirely? Billionaires openly defy the law, and way too often get away with it.
Republicans don’t really believe in trickle-down economics. They don’t care about the poor. They care only about themselves.
The Republican Party of the Civil War and the Republican Party of today have nothing in common beyond a name. The party today is composed of the traitors and seditionists of the New Confederacy, and they should be dealt with the way we should have dealt with their traitor forebears, of which my patriot ancestors didn't kill enough of them when the opportunity presented itself.
I am pessimistic that the debt ceiling crisis will be resolved before a default occurs. The Democrats have not messaged this well--the amount of wealth transferred out of the bottom 90% to the top 1% is OBSCENE and that has not gotten out in the media. The problem is a TAX (REVENUE) problem and not a JUST A SPENDING problem as the Republicans claim.
I occasionally work in the snack bar at my kid’s school. The kids of the parents who work there get free snacks when their parents are working. The other day, I watched as my co-worker’s kid came behind the counter and grabbed snacks for not only himself but their whole friend group, including several of the coveted and scarce just baked cookies. This while a line of kids whose parents don’t or can’t work in the snack bar (or just weren’t working that day) waited in line hoping to get and then to pay for those same cookies. But if you were to ask the kids in line why they didn’t get a cookie, they would blame the kid in front of them who bought 2 cookies or the kid who cut or the kitchen staff who didn’t make enough cookies. They would never have seen the raid that was carried out while they were jockeying for position and then trying desperately to hold their position in that line. This is how privilege works.
I wish Biden had agreed to enter negotiations with McCarthy ONLY if tax increases on the wealthy and corporations remain. No discussion about any cuts of any kind without that guarantee.
The mass cruelty and mean-spiritedness in the Republican Party right now is incomprehensible.
Thank you, Dr. Richardson, for showing so clearly what's in a name. And what is not in a name.
And we can thank Gaetz for those words "our hostage".
Mobsters' language, rule by racket.
Raise taxes on the wealthy. Tax the wealthy to death, if possible. Remove the income cap on an individual's salary payments into Social Security, so Social Security is solvent forever. Increase discretionary spending. Forgive all student debt.
Superb historical retort to GOP tax-and-spend complaints, Heather. I am so grateful for your presence in my daily reading.
"Faced in 1861 with funding the Civil War, members of the Republican Party invented the U.S. income tax and graduated it to make sure that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senator William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it."
Only one of many respects that the nominally "Republican Party" seems the antithesis of the Republican Party of Lincoln.
Same old stupid from the Republicans.
I explained the current debt crisis to my kids and wife using this analogy and they found it helpful-
The Rs and Ds are like a husband and wife who spend more than they make and their way of deciding how to agree on future spending is to not pay their upcoming bank payment.