More on our situation

More on Demand Side economics We've seen how this lousy economic situation happened. We've gone from people earning money and spending money, a demand based economy, to people's taxes being doubled under Reagan, the money being given to the wealthy where in most cases they are either saving it, sending it to China or maybe buying new ivory backscratchers. Either way the idea of it trickling down doesn't seem to be on their minds.

For people to maintain lifestyles they had from the late 40's throughout the 70's had to start borrowing and now we're all tapped out. So where do we go now? Dick Cheney said "One thing Ronald Reagan taught us is that deficits don't matter." From the Sunday paper insert "Parade" "For sale, U.S. roads, some of America's cash strapped states and cities are leasing public roads to the higest bidder who are often foreign investors. Chicago's Skyway is controlled by the Spanish-Austrailian Investment Group, an Italian firm operates the Dullus Greenway outside of Washington DC." You want to get to the nation's captital's airport you have to get on a greenway that is owned by a company that is out of Italy!

Abu Dhabi is poised to drop their connection to the dollar, why? Because the dollar is inflating like mad. They are experiencing 11% inflation in the UAE, because they don't fiddle with their inflation numbers. Kevin Phillips says our inflation numbers are total nonsense! A whole series of things happened, The Clinton Administration changed them, in 1994 the Bereau of Labor Statistics said if you work for less than half a year, you're now a "discouraged worker" and won't be counted as unemployed so right away 4 million people fell off the unemployment rolls. Looked good for the Clinton economy but really wasn't so good for us. They also thinned the economic sample by a sixth, it went from 60,000 families to 50,000 and guess who the 10,000 people they didn't samply anymore was, the inner city! So we no longer look at the areas where unemployment is highest in the United States, bottom line, we've got totally phony numbers. Now we can thank Clinton for that, but when we look at what was going on at the time with political pressure from the newly elected Republican majority in Congress coming into office we can probably attribute that to Clinton being weak knee'd in the face of what appeared to be a mandate from the people for Republicans on economic issues when in fact the Gringrich Revolution was mostly based on the culture war and the fear that things were going too far away from societal norms than fiscally.

According to Kevin Phillips, one of the top economists, and top conservatives in America says here's the real numbers, get this, today's unemployment rate is actually between 9 and 12%, our infaltion rate is actually between 7and 10%, our economic growth rate, once we take out the already rich and the super rich is not even there, we're creeping into recession, and that's Keven Phillips.

Meanwhile because our dollar has fallen so far, who won this battle between Bush and bin Laden, to the extent that it was a battle, not sure it ever was because Bush never went after him really. Nonetheless in 1998 Osama bin Laden said in an interview that one of the things that was really wrong with the world was the fact that we were "stealing oil from Saudi Arabia" his holy land. We were paying $11.00 per barrell in '98 as you may recall. How much did he say it should be? He said it should be about $144.00 per barrell. Guess what the price went to last summer, you guessed it folks, $144.00 per barrell. I would say that Osama bin Laden has effectivley won the economic war against the United States. He is bankrupting us. But really it's not so much bin Laden that's doing it, it's Bush and Republican policies, that's the bottom line, it comes down to that.

On top of that we've just seen the biggest job loss number come in for 2008, the biggest seen for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS actually at 159,000 jobs LOST!! That's NINE MONTHS IN A ROW OF JOB LOSS, and HUGE job losses at that every month!! Nobody's mentioning the fact that even if there were no jobs lost, there would still arguably be jobs lost due to the fact that on average we've got over 100,000 people coming into the job market every month as young people graduate from high school and college coming into the job market at higher numbers than people are retiring or dying. So we have to have 115,000 jobs a month just to keep even. At least during the 8 years of the Clinton administration for all of it's faults, over thirty million jobs were created, during the almost 8 years of the Bush administration, three million jobs have been created. Now granted under Bush economics and the second half of Clinton economic policies if you got lost your good paying full time union job and you took a part time job working at Wal Mart and another part time job working at a gas station, you are now considered to be 2 employed people.So according to statistics, things went up! That's how bad the book keeping is.Now it's cracking down into the 401k's, all the while the neocons have been saying we need to privatize Social Security and put it into a 401k type of system, forget pensions, that's so outdated, people want a fixed amount of money, not a pension that pays every month for the rest of their lives no matter how long like Social Security does, which is a pension, instead they want a defined benefit plan where if you put in 100,000 dollars, you get out 100,000 dollars plus intrest. The problem is, most 401k plans are based in the stock market and what's happening to the stock market now? It's going south! You hear anyone promoting privatization of Social Security now? Even John McCain flipped his flop from for it, to against earlier this month. I'm telling you folks, the Republicans have destroyed our economy for everyone.

Look, as long as we refuse to admit that Reagan didn't actually save us from the economic woes of the late 70's and early 80's and as long as we don't admit that it was all a fantastic illusion based on borrowed money that was never totally paid back (both with Republicans Reagan, Bush I and Bush II as well as the Democratic President Clinton) and the real problem of jobs and wages were never solved, only worsened during this time over the past 30 years, we'll only see our intrests fall to below the poverty line and our aspects of doing better seriously hobbled.

Remember, if Gen X is the first American generation to not do better than their parents did then the boomers will be the fist American generation to leave the country worse off than their parents left it to them, after all the country was coming back from the Depression by the end of Roosevelt's 2nd term though it would be until around 1953, '54 before the stock market had totally recovered some quarter century after the crash of '29, at least they spent that quarter century fixing the real problem. Now that we're more than a quarter century away from the end of the Vietnam war, and the resulting effect that the money borrowed for it had come due by the late 70's (considering it ended totally in '75) we never fixed the problem, only deluded ourselves about how well we had done and how far we had come.

Don't you think it's time to change, don't you think it's time for honesty in assesing the situation and actually fixing a thing or three that's wrong?

Reality of Reaganomics

As Gen X will remember, back around 1991, 1992 we were told that we would be the first American generation to NOT do better or even as well as our parents।

For years we wondered just why this was. We asked ourselves, can this be true? How can this have happened? Especially after the messiah Ronald Reagan came in and saved us all. Or did he?

The main reason behind the holding back of achieving the reality of the American dream and offered a watered down, debt ridden version of it is because of Conservative/Republican economic policies, because we have replaced old fashioned "demand side" economics that was the way this country was run for over 200 years and arguably goes back thousands of years.

Demand side economics basically is the idea that there are people out there that want to buy things, gee, I think I'll start a business to sell to them. With "supply side" economics, an invention that came to life during the Reagan adminsitration basically says, let's take the public's money and give it to wealthy people and hopefully they'll build more factories, and they'll get even more wealthy, and in the process of them buying yachts, they'll build factories that will create new jobs buidling yachts, and when they buy more Gulf Stream airplanes, Gulf Stream will create new jobs building Gulf Stream airplanes and hopefully they'll build more factories making more things that we'll want to buy.

THIS HAS BEEN A DISASTER!! IT DOESN'T WORK!!

The traditional concept of economics is people buy things because they have the money to buy them. What drives an economy is demand and the demand comes in part because people have the means to fulfill that demand. In other words they're making enough money to buy things.

There were really two pieces to Reaganomics, the first part basically said, we're going to forget about whether or not people can afford to buy things, we're going to tax working people, literally doubled the tax on the middle class and put in huge tax breaks (it went from 70% to 28% on people making over 3.2 million dollars per year) on the very wealthy and on corporations. Before Reagan came into office major corporations were paying 35% of all infastructure like police and fire that yes, even corporations use. Because of that we are now down to around 7 or 8% of our taxes in the United States are paid by corporations, the rest are paid by individual taxpayers, you know, you and me. There's the reason YOUR taxes are so high.

The Reagan Administration came to the conclusion, as a result of this supply side silliness that it doesn't matter if people actually have the money or not because we're all about raising corporate profits. So they cut corporate taxes, gave them money to the corporations by way of subsidies, bonuses, more free Federal land for the oil industry, mining industry, etc. We're going to change our rules on international trade so their manufacturing floors can move overseas, they can make the cars in Mexico, make the toys in China, etc, etc. so labor becomes cheaper, as a consequence of that corporate profits go up as well we didn't see necessarily where prices went down, but profits did go up. So the bottom line was, destroy the ability of the wage earner to earn money and shift all this money up to the top. There's a slight problem here, who's going to buy anything if they don't have income anymore?

We've seen the income of the average American worker erode after it had climbed for years and years. From 1949 to '59 the median income of American familes grew by 37%. From 1959 to '70 it grew by 41%, that's SUBSTANTIAL INCREASE in the income of working people. People were making more money every year. People knew that they could do better than there Dad had. Every year was a better year as far as income was concerned. By the end of the Carter Administration, mainly because we were ringing out all the money borrowed for the Vietnam War it dropped down to 6.8% during the late 70's and 97% of that went to the top 20% of families. Since Reagan came along real income for wage earning Americans, people who earn a paycheck and don't live off of dividends. Real income has DECREASED steadily.

So the Republicans looked at this and said this is working out well for our fat cat campaign contributors, the top 2%, the millionaires and the billionaires, the top tenth of 1%, but we've got this problem, we've got consumers that aren't buying stuff. So Greenspan came along and said, loosen credit, let them borrow. During the 40's and 50's when we were seeing wage growth every year, the middle class became strong, people bought their homes, they bought their cars, land, ASSETS! Let's strip them of their assets. Make it easy for them to refinance their house as times get tougher, make it easier to buy on credit, don't even buy a car, just lease it. Let them run up credit card debt high intrest rates and make it easy for the credit card companies to screw them.

Basically what has happened over the last 30 years Americans have, by government policy, been thrown massively in debt as a way to keep buying stuff, as a way to keep the economy moving and here we are now, it's coming to an end. It's coming to an end in two ways, Number One; We're reaching the limits of credit. Americans are tapped out. We're so broke we can't afford to borrow money anymore. Number 2; The government has been doing the same thing. 70% of the TOTAL DEBT of America was run up by THREE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS!!! Two Bushes and a Reagan.

The consequence of this is that our dollar is falling through the floor, now places like Abu Dhabi and other countries around the world that have a dollar peg are strongly considering de-pegging our currency and theirs.

It's time to get past ideology and admit to ourselves for all of their talk, all of their shoving it down our throat, it's time to admit that Republican policy has failed the United States of America, and as a result, we, the good ol' U.S. of A. as the leaders of the free world, with all of our promise to spread good will and uplift and promote democracy and freedom of thought everywhere have failed in our stewardship of our own Constitution, and our own freedoms.

We are citizens, it's time to act like it. Don't be distracted by a go nowhere culture war, be sensible and do what's right, stay away from what's wrong (even if it's legal) and don't be anybody's fool!!

Repugnacons simply are NOT better at business or government

The numbers don't lie. Repugnacons simply are not better managers of anything. Be it business or government the Repugnacons just don't have what it takes to run things and do them right.

No Repugnacon has ever left office with LESS that 5% unemployment and double digit inflation, as a matter of fact the old Republican Herbert Hoover left office with more than 20% unemployment and had effectivley made the Great Depression really a great one indeed but was still convinced that the markets would work all of this out on its own.

Well sure it would, it would work itself out, but when? When the unemployment rate had gone to where, 30%, 50%? It's easy to wax eloquent about purism of the markets when even with the country at 75% unemployed, you're still going to be rich.

My fellow working Americans (that's most all of us) GET OFF YOUR ASS!! Let's go get it back for us and ours. We had it great, we can have it again.


ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Republicans Can't Run Government or Business

January 2001 September 2008
(Under Clinton) (Under Bush)

Unemployment Rate: 4.2% 6.1%

Budget: $281B Surplus $357B Deficit

Debt: $5.7 Trillion $9.7 Trillion

Gas Prices: $1.46 $4.00