What does the tea-party acronym stand for again? Taxed Enough Already, as some of you recall. That’s the credo for our age, whether or not there’s any truth to the sentiment. If people are paying higher taxes, they’re doing so on the local level; as county and municipal governments try to grapple with austerity policies from above, they resort to whatever means of revenue generation that may be available to them. Federal austerity starves state coffers; that in turn negatively impacts localities. Combine that with the fact that we are in the midst of a depression of sorts – i.e. a period when people need greater assistance from the government, not less – and that causes upward pressure on local taxes.
When that happens, people inevitably look for someone to blame. Lately that someone has been unionized public employees. Sad to say, my fellow Americans are all too quick to think the worst of them. That’s not surprising. A lot of editorial ink, political rhetoric, and advertising resources have been placed against vilifying the very notion of working for government. It’s a waste of money, they’re a bunch of lazy layabouts who can’t make it in the private sector, etc., etc. For a long time that blanket criticism seemed confined to, say, the people down at the DMV, but in recent years it’s been expanded to teachers and even public safety employees.
Here’s what the critics – at least, the non-cynical critics – don’t appear to understand: When you lay off public workers, you create more problems than you solve. For one thing, you make whatever institution they worked for less effective; that means less value to the taxpayers. For another, those individuals are now out in the public sector workforce, competing for the same jobs that everyone else is trying to get. Thirdly, their lost income results in less consumer spending (yes, public workers buy groceries, clothes, and gasoline just like the rest of us), which means lower consumption tax revenues, which means – yep – budget gaps of the type we’re grappling with now.
What’s needed, as Jim Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others have pointed out, is federal stimulus – aid to state and local governments so that they can stop shedding jobs and adding to the ranks of the unemployed, infrastructure spending that will build out the economy and create jobs at the same time, and other public investments.
Perhaps if the GOP could take a break from passing radical anti-abortion legislation for about five minutes, perhaps they’d consider doing something about this depression. Just saying.
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The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a “conscience” exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna Carta, even though few of them have ever read the document in its entirety. Next, they’ll demand all proposed laws draw on neolithic cave paintings.) Then there are the fetal “personhood” statute and vaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia, scaled back in the face of massive protests by women in that divided state. This … from the party that was all about jobs, jobs, jobs during the 2010 election. See what happens when you trust them?
him to even want to be president than to carry out the wishes of corporate America more consistently than even their bought and paid-for politicians of both parties.
atrocities they played a central role in committing. Even with all this, I spent a good amount of time watching that film by those French guys who were with the firehouse that first responded to the Trade Tower disaster. Gripping stuff. Those firefighters are giants.
some of the legions of unemployed. They cling to this belief, rhetorically at least, even when it’s clear that a) businesses already have multiple trillions in savings they are sitting on right now, and b) they have no intention of spending any of it on new hires so long as they can press their current employees to do the work of three, four, perhaps more. Ask anybody who’s got a job, and they’ll tell you – increased productivity is just the modern term of art for speeding up the assembly line.
entail new spending. So we’ve reached a pass where budget items need to (a) win approval from both houses of Congress and be signed into law, (b) run the same gauntlet a second time in the form of appropriations bills, and (c) get past the blackmail play around raising the debt ceiling to cover funds already duly appropriated. This is why the G.O.P. wants to make the debt ceiling extension a two-step process – so that down the line, they can shake us down for more concessions. This is bogus as hell and should be denounced as such, every minute of every day.
circumstances is a very attractive position for conservatives and watery republicans like Boehner. It’s very, very shiny. Also, the consequences of breaking that promise are painful for them to contemplate. So …. over the cliff we go!
How substantial? Default – or even near-default – could cause a global financial disruption on a scale that would dwarf that of late 2008. At the very least, a downgrade of the investment rating of U.S. Treasury bonds would be not only unprecedented but extremely costly, making service on our existing debt far more costly, blowing an even bigger hole in the federal budget. If that alone were to happen it would be bad enough. But these facts just don’t seem to register on Capitol Hill.
First of all, what’s this “we” about? Got a mouse in your pocket? Second… cut taxes? Again? So much for fiscal responsibility. These guys have exactly one idea. No, wait – two: Reduce regulation. (See BP, above.) That will “speed up this pace of government” as we approach the cliff.