[Peace-discuss] Candidates of the destructive rich

[C. G. Estabrook]

[David Cay Johnston, commenting on the debate in Nashville on Democracy Now this 
morning. He was an investigative journalist for the Times & won a Pulitzer Prize 
for his coverage of the tax system.]

[Obama & McCain on taxes:] Meaningless marginalism and economic fantasy that 
Lewis Carroll, had he been an economist, could have written. The fact is that we 
were promised in 1980 by Ronald Reagan: “Elect me, and I’ll get you very quickly 
to balanced budgets.” Instead, we have four times the amount of government debt 
that we had back in 1980.

The taxes that Americans have paid in advance for Social Security benefits in 
the future were spent, principally to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest 
Americans. Right now, with the bailout in effect next year, the equivalent of 
all the income taxes that you pay in January, February, March, April and a good 
chunk of May just go to pay interest on the national debt -- and that money goes 
to China, foreign sovereign funds, wealthy individuals, insurance companies. It 
is a transfer from working people to those who are already wealthy.

The idea that we can cut [?] our way out of this is just absurd. And let me give 
you a little example of this: I spent six weeks in Europe this year talking to 
ordinary people in twelve countries -— rural Slovakia, Scandinavia, elsewhere -— 
and about their economics and their finances. In Sweden, you are three times 
more likely to own a boat than you are in America. You’re much more likely to 
own a home free and clear. In fact, I walked up to a gaggle of bus drivers in 
Stockholm, and it turned out every one of them owned two houses -— a city house 
or apartment and a country home -— and every one of them owned them free and 
clear. What are the odds in the American economy that you could find a dozen bus 
drivers anywhere who owned one house free and clear?

There is a fundamental flaw in the economic theory that we have been operating 
on for years. And that theory doesn’t address what matters, what you spend your 
tax dollars on. We are not spending our tax dollars on greasing the wheels of 
commerce, building a stable society, educating people and removing the shocks 
from things like accidents and disease. We are spending it on income transfers 
to the rich, on war, on interest on the national debt. And it’s impoverishing us 
steadily. Neither one of these presidential candidates is addressing the need 
for fundamental reform to build a sound economy that will take us into the future.

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