Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Borrowing to Prosperity

Obama sternly rebuked the Republicans for holding up his "Jobs" Bill. According to Obama, this bill will loan money and give tax breaks to small businesses, which will then magically create enough jobs for the 14.6 million people who are officially unemployed.

Are there really people out there just itching to start new businesses so they can get tax breaks? Who yearn to go into deeper debt to start a business which will probably go bankrupt within a few years?

Americans are more in debt than their government. To pretend that offering more credit is the way to economic health is astonishingly irresponsible.

Especially because while small businesses are encouraged to borrow, large corporations are subsidized by tax money. They get grants, not loans. They get land giveaways, infrastructure building, tax holidays and other "incentives", which workers and small businessmen pay for. They get welfare mothers forced to work for them for minimum wage.

We need to quit talking about stimulating the economy, saving the economy, or helping the economy.

The economy, which now seems to be a code word for the FIRE section of the economy, the part that lends money, is not working for actual people..

The government should help people, not the "economy".

Screw the banks. Let them fail.

The government has the power to issue money. The Constitution gives them to power to mint coins, i.e., money. The Powers That Be twist this into saying that the mints make coins, and the Federal Reserve prints the paper money. This is absurd. Clearly, minting coins means issuing money.

The US government has the power to mint coins, i.e. money.

Let the US government print money and pay people to do useful work, like teaching, firefighting, planting trees, refurbishing housing, laying lightrail track, building solar panels and windmills, taking care of children, providing clean water, and other socially necessary things.

The workers can then take that money and spend it on what they see fit, keeping farmers in business, local businesses going, etc.

Bring home all the troops and stop spending so much money on killing, corporate welfare, agribusiness welfare, Homeland Security, prisons, and other oppressive functions.

There. Take care of the people and the "economy" takes care of itself.

3 comments:

Pangolin said...

First you have to know a few small businessmen who have closed their doors because they have no customers.

Then you have to track down the customers only to find they are broke because they lost their jobs, had their hours or wages cut or are supporting a friend or family member who would otherwise be homeless.

Then you have to accept that people are perfectly willing to work as long as the work is not hazardous to their bodies or sanity.

Only then do you get to the point where you might think that taking care of "people" might be what economies are for.

America has spent thirty years kicking homeless people. We're nowhere near the point where we can stop throwing out scapegoats and looking at the pathetic reality.

Sad to say.

David G. said...

Take care of the people! What heresy is this?

Governments are there to take care of Big Business and the Wealthy and the Armament Manufacturers and the Churches and the Media Barons, aren't they?

Government by the people, for the people. That's old-fashioned.

Sadly

K.L. Ashley said...

Governments are humans and thus self-serving, by nature. Its best deal comes from up, not down. What government was ever altruistic (except fake, if it served)?

Like a judge on very bottom of the oligarchy totem pole; if the big judge says the Arabs did, then so be it.

Increasing population against robots getting the best jobs has been on a collision course for years. Bigger tractors. It is not just off shoring. That disguises this fact. One job, one person, no matter how menial? OK in Malawi, but a difference culture.

And the name of the game has always been on "growth", the key to the quarterly bottom line. But growth can be in conflict with the environment, which is reaching the limit. A car could easily last for 20 years. Take your bag to the grocery store, on and on. A hundred million plastic bags, every day. Stop landscaping with grass. No new loud lawn mower. But jobs lost, right?

On the interstate recently, highway people were once again mowing everything, including the wide space between lanes. This is in a very dry late summer climate. (Mountain states.) So really all that was surviving was a array of wild flowers, and some wilting brown wild grass varieties. But in the US, there exists this passion for mowing. It will be really ugly now, through the winter. But the mowers need the jobs. On and on.

High tech (and its jobs) has held off the reality of the conflict for many years, but who needs a faster computer when the old ones go to the landfill. Things are so automated already that people are going into atrophy.

A big surge in "alternative" emphasis could do the same once again, for a while.

But of course things should be left to their natural course. Reality needs to come gushing, surging to the surface. People are slow to learn. But can they ever? When human existence is in a mindless, stupefied, controlled commune, will the babies keep coming? Probably. Humans adjust.

And people are now free to pollute with their Monsanto kill all lawn treatment, as global warming is all a scam, they are told. And they could never get the difference, regardless.