I wrote the following editorial published in the Helena Independent Record October 28, 2013. The motivation was two especially scary editorials that had appeared in the same paper during the previous couple of weeks.
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FDR: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Have you noticed every time a politician speaks, we’re told we
should be very afraid for our future? “Our
federal government is going broke, we’re going to have to borrow more money
from the Chinese, inflation is just around the corner, and our children and
grandchildren are going to be saddled with an unbearable debt burden. Revenue is not the problem, taxes are already
too high. Spending is the problem, it’s
out of control and “entitlements” are the reason. You’re just going to have to sacrifice more.”
The fear stories range from the hyperbolic overreach (IR,
October 1) of the uninformed like Joe Balyeat, the Montana mouthpiece for the
fossil fuels billionaires Koch brothers, to a more respectable John Snow,
former Treasury Secretary under President Bush II, who undoubtedly knows the
above fear stories are not true (as reported
by Bob Brown in the IR, October 16).
We’ve just witnessed a manufactured 16 day government
shutdown engineered by the U.S. Congressional Republicans that caused ~$30
billion in lost GDP, the furloughing of nearly one million federal government
workers, and a narrowly averted globally catastrophic economic meltdown that
would have resulted if the Republican Congress had refused to allow the
government to make interest payments on holders of U.S. Treasuries.
These fabricated crises have caused over $700 Billion in
lost national GDP since the Tea Party emergence in 2010. Republicans are intent on scaring us all into
believing that the U.S. government is going broke unless we dismantle Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But
it’s all nonsense.
Many have been duped into believing the “government is going
broke” storyline we are being fed by this anti-government rhetoric. But consider this: never in its entire
history has the country gone broke, yet it has carried a so-called “national
debt” every year of its existence except for three years between 1834 and 1837.
If Congress spending creates a heavy debt burden on future
generations, why haven’t those of us alive today had to pay back past “national
debt?”
Ask yourself this.
Where do the Chinese get their U.S. dollars to lend us, when the U.S.
government is the sole producer of the dollar?
Also ask yourself how the U.S. government can afford to
spend trillions to bail out Wall Street and its mega-corporations every time
they create a private-sector bubble that bursts, yet they cannot help the
citizens who were financially destroyed by the explosion.
A brief review of America’s past century is revealing. The wealth inequities of the 1920s were
remarkably similar to the wealth inequities of the decade preceding the 2007
market crash. The real estate and stock
market behavior of the 1920s was nearly identical to the markets behavior of
the 1990s and early 2000s. Market values
were artificially high and the wealth gap between the ultra-wealthy and the
rest of us were at all-time highs at the times of both crashes.
The end result of both periods was complete collapse of the economy, the Great Depression of
1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 respectively. We’re still trying to recover from the latter,
and today we sit at a tipping point much like the one Franklin D. Roosevelt
faced in 1933.
Rather than cut federal spending, FDR took a different
approach in taking office in 1933. At
the depth of the depression, he recognized that only the federal government had
the capability to provide jobs so desperately needed.
In his inauguration speech, FDR spoke these famous words, “The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Then he brought a conservative Utah banker, Marriner Eccles,
to Washington to serve as the architect of FDR’s financial markets regulatory
reform and New Deal jobs Programs. Under
Eccles’ leadership, a tightly regulated financial market coupled with
government deficit spending lead America into an era of unprecedented worldwide
prosperity. We built gigantic modern public
infrastructures like dams, airports, highways, and schools in America while at
the same time propping up the economies of war-torn Europe. During the 1940s through the 1970s, the
federal government funded public education for all, developed the atomic bomb,
and sent men to the moon. The government
funded all these inspirational things that provided people with jobs and did it
with so-called government “borrowing.”
Today we again stand at a cross-road and our federal
government is faced with two options: 1) continue the current path of
job-killing austerity, or 2) take the FDR path to return to prosperity by
directly funding job creation programs to modernize our infrastructures, fully
fund our safety net programs, and fund public education and state sponsored
research institutions.
The so-called “national debt” problem is pure political
fabrication. The real crisis we face
today is very same one created by the extreme wealth inequity in America of the
1920s. It is the failure of our federal
government to directly fund job creation programs to rebuild our great nation
as FDR did in the 1930s.
The fact is that the private sector businesses are not the
only creators of “real” jobs, regardless of what the “small government”
ideologues tell us.
The choice of America’s path belongs to us voters because it
is us who send our representatives to Washington to create “our future” we
demand of them. Is it job creation or is
it job-killing “debt” reduction.
The 2014 mid-term elections are looming large!
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