This was written by a friend-of-a-friend, a retired successful financial professional appalled by the GOP budgets and what they illustrate about the direction of our country.
She grew up during World War II, and lived through many eras and Presidents.
Some of her observations:
I grew up bursting with pride in my country. Equally important, I felt that I was in it with all Americans, rich and poor.
We can’t have 1.3 million people working at the federal minimum wage. They need food stamps. How can they be consumers?
I, who two weeks ago could not vote for a knee-jerk liberal like Elizabeth Warren, now consider her a milquetoast ... I'm looking for a leader with a sharp mind like hers but a big and booming voice who will make my rude demands.
Here is her full post:
I don’t know if there was something within me waiting to erupt or if it was truly the Republican House budget proposal that has me a “radical leftist.”
But here I am.
I now have a proposal of my own, which allows individuals to earn only $1 million or $10 million, something paltry, to be taxed at the national top rate, with succeeding dollars taxed at 70 percent.
I want to rebuild my country, which since President Reagan, has decayed. I want to creatively approach our crowded highway and airport problems, to re-build our public universities, get back the pride and bring tuitions back down where they belong. Block grants for K-12 education to the states do not need conditions, except that equal funds be spent on each student. The states have wrestled with this long enough to know what they want, but I think they will find joy when they have real money “to throw at it.”
As for the top percent in their fiefdoms who will be footing this bill, the adjustment will be gradual. Eventually it will be harder to keep full-time staffs in all the homes and in both yachts.
For this generation there won’t have to be hesitation before purchasing the third $90 million Rothko. Christie’s and Sotheby’s will continue to prosper.
To say that we have extreme inequality is insipid; that’s not the point. Our most wealthy citizens have their own infrastructures, their own airfields and jets, or failing airfields, helicopters to ferry them to local airports where private jets are waiting. They are not embarrassed by shabby airports, or troubled by run-down, jammed highways or dangerous bridges. Infrastructure spending over the past ten years has been .06 percent; adjusted for depreciation, zero percent. (My source is Lawrence Summers.)
Those numbers are scandalous and show that America has not taken care of itself in the most basic way; it has not been a responsible country. To a ridiculous extent we have been obsessed with the project of creating and delivering individual financial wealth and of the creation of gadgets in Silicon Valley. The balance of our attention has been the conduct of war. Politicians hitch rides with lobbyists and never look down. Important people don’t crowd onto or into our unsightly, aging infrastructure with the masses. We have transferred our national wealth to people who have built pristine kingdoms, who might avail themselves of Beaver Creek or Jackson Hole, but don’t need government, except as its policies might affect their taxes or investments. And for that they have political contributions and PAC’s.
There has been a pattern of de-funding public universities to support local tax cuts, and a pattern of steady decline in a system that might be hanging on by a hair to its global reputation. The endowments of universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, where all good things are more and more concentrated, could each support numerous universities, a dozen universities, twenty? The one percent spend fortunes preparing their children to be accepted and, of course, their wealth secures success. The only way for us as a country to regain our former luster and to rescue our proud system of nation-wide universities is to go after the money and begin.
It is important that the coming budget take care with the economy. Had I not overnight become such a lefty, I could understand what Paul Ryan is trying to do with his 25 percent top tax rate, paired with an alternative minimum rate. (Why doesn’t he let us know the alternative minimum rate?)
Just a few years ago I would have approved. Now it’s too late.
Because it has always been true, I will assume that this Republican tax cut will erode the tax base; there’s $40 billion in “emergency” defense spending. It is impossible for me to see, much less comprehend, a lot of the vital characteristics of this budget. It is generally agreed that it eliminate budget deficits and bring down the national debt more slowly than current budget trends would do. In order to balance the budget, when it does, assumptions have to be made about dynamic economic growth and macroeconomic growth impact (on two occasions) resulting from the tax cuts.
These are supply-side effects, brought forth by dynamic scoring, and if you believe this, then Game of Thrones is History and The Hunger Games is where your mother went to high school.
The general impression one gets of this budget is that it is careless, a smacked-together thing of wishes and postures.
That said, I have two sources of comfort: The most hide-bound and technically clueless economists in the Republican Party are with Jeb Bush and so are not advising the Congress; and a lot of this Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink/Voodoo-Economics budget could be in there to be negotiated away. Much will transpire between now and when a budget is approved.
I feel that I must remind people that 2008 is not over*. [*I don’t know how people can be unscarred by this cataclysm. GE, one of the companies that makes one step a little higher and makes one proud to be an American, could not get two-day commercial paper accepted at any New York Bank. This was not reported above the fold on the first page of the WSJ, because even more ominous news was routine. If GE cannot manage its cash, I thought, nobody can!]
This economy could be prone to upset until there are quarters of solid growth and the Fed has been able to raise interest rates a few times. Then we will know we are on solid ground. The people at the bottom — the poor, the old, the people first to lose jobs — will be hurt most if anything should go wrong. Can’t we leave food stamps alone for a year?
Medicaid is not primarily a poverty program. It pays for two-thirds of all long-term care in the country and for severe childhood problems across classes. It is a one-trillion, three-hundred and fifty-six billion dollar program. The Republicans are proposing taking $913 billion dollars out of it, which would leave $443 billion for distribution to the fifty states in block grants to administer their own Medicaid programs. This is an experiment in federalism that may as well be a truckload of C-4. The baby boom generation is on the cusp of long-term care, and people admire Sarah Palin’s special-needs baby, but Medicaid will pay.
It’s comical. Think of the Republican governors struggling with their budget deficits. Scott Walker decides he is going to eliminate modern languages from the University of Wisconsin. He has already cut the UW budget by $300 million, but they can’t take their eyes off him for a minute.
Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has raided reserve funds and sold off state property in a series of one-off gimmicks to balance the budget without raising taxes. The Republicans grumble that he is leaving a mess for the next governor, but Jindal is hoping to be in D. C. when he is termed-out — this Louisiana university-raider.
Chris Christie has three or four lawsuits he’s facing in New Jersey for snatching funds to balance his budget; but he’s a big guy, we’ll see how it goes.
Fast-forward a decade and these states, which cannot raise taxes because they’re Republican and have Moody’s ratings less than B-; and have the first cohort of baby-boomers at eighty years old, many of whom need long-term care, and have an array of expensive programs like taking care of badly disabled children; are granted thirty percent of the cost of the Medicaid program by the federal government. Then, the final kicker will be, that the states are going to have to handle all of this with state workers in their generally remote state capitals.
One suspects that the Republicans needed a chunk of money over ten years. Looking down the column they saw the big, fat Medicaid program. Let’s cut that!
I saw one of them, maybe Paul Ryan, on FOX talking about getting people on food stamps to go out and get jobs. And I thought, they probably have jobs at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which after Social Security is $12,000 a year, which qualifies a person for food stamps.
Or maybe they are like my friend Gloria, 70, with $325 a month in Social Security, all going for rent, on Medicaid for her open-heart surgery and two strokes, who pays for groceries with food stamps and housework.
Yes, you go out and talk to her, Congressman Ryan, but her strokes left her with a speech impediment.
Vastly over-paid Republicans intuit that hunger in America is related to poor character and habits of dependence nurtured by Democrats. (For decades food stamps had bi-partisan support.) It is a favorite topic for cocktail-party conversation — and on FOX. (There are anecdotal stories of potato chips, and worse, bought with food stamps.) And yet, how many have taken the simple step of checking the program for its purchasing restrictions and for its demographic distribution to see how many people on food stamps are indeed employed. True to its principles, FOX has not.
He is figuring out a strategy for cracking that food-stamp nut, but in the meantime, Congressman Ryan is content in the knowledge that he has done his part to secure and augment the estates of United States citizens who enjoy private islands and own Bombardier BD-700s with ‘round-the-clock crews.
America was founded on the principle of individual freedom and there is no better embodiment of that than its five-hundred billionaires and hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of millions: This is the American dream, as the founders intended. As long as it is fostered and tended and this group is free to prosper, grow and reinvest its income while guiding the U. S. Government, we will be on the right track.
Second World War children, my sisters and I took flattened food cans to the Government’s scrap metal pile almost every day. Each family car could get three or four gallons of gasoline a week and neighbors car-pooled and shared their cars. The Japanese had taken over the sources of rubber; if your tires wore out before the war was over, that was that. We ate “olio” instead of butter, very little sugar or meat, which was sent to the boys fighting overseas.
Mother dressed in her Civil Air Patrol uniform and oxfords for breakfast with us, then left on her rounds to make sure that people were prepared in case there was an invasion. Americans bought war bonds to help their country and wealthy patriots, far from worrying about their individual freedom, endured marginal tax rates of 91 percent to bring down the whopping deficit (120 percent of GDP) after the war.
I grew up bursting with pride in my country. Equally important, I felt that I was in it with all Americans, rich and poor.
You know about the G.I. Bill and our comprehensively educated generation. They, in turn, sharpened our greatest companies and beckoned Americans to come work with them: Hershey, 3-M, GE, United Technologies, IBM, Caterpillar Tractor, Bechtel, Cummins Engine, Levi Strauss and more. These companies were good citizens who treated employees well and created not just an industrial colossus, but a great place to live and work. They did all of this with their executives paying a top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent and not living very far away from their workers.
Today it appears to be different. People put up with their jobs, take the money and run. Is there a sense of community with our citizens, a sense of pride in our companies? Or do we feel that our trillion-dollar companies — Google and Comcast — are takers, not givers, like those five-hundred billionaires?
If our politicians cared about business, why didn’t they insist that an American company get the job of building the Keystone XL pipeline? Has Morrison Knudson gone out of business? I know Bechtel is still there. With so many storage facilities along the route, we need to transport oil; and like so many other things, we can’t maintain our railroad tracks. But I feel colonized with a Canadian company coming here to do the construction and Americans working on four- and eight-month shifts as braceros.
Those politicians don’t think of the U. S. as a country that builds.
Doesn’t it make you feel ashamed that we can’t maintain railroad tracks? That we couldn’t build the pipeline? This never would have happened before we became wusses. It probably never occurred to our politicians to speak up in favor of American industry. Now our best people amass financial assets. Others tend their needs.
It is time for this economy to grow away from finance. We can do that by taking funds out of the investment pool, away from the billionaires and multi-multi-millionaires and re-building America. It was re-distributed up, beginning with Ronald Reagan.
I’ll admit it: I want the country to re-capture some of the booty, so that we can maintain our infrastructure. If we are going to have a railroad, its tracks should be tip-top; our highways, superb. Our airports should be just as modern as those of other countries.
Why not? What is the U.S.? Dog Patch?
We have to take the burden of taxation off the $200,000-and-below tax-payers and move it up to the $1,000,000 and above. It’s going to have to be confiscatory, not as a matter of envy or bad will, but as a practical matter. It’s has been so much easier to collect the bulk of tax receipts from the $200,000-and-below. They are struggling, getting children through college, and saving for retirement; they don’t contribute to PAC’s; and there are so many of them that the numbers work out quite easily. If this group’s tax burdens were eased their retirements would be more secure and it’s likely we would find our Social Security problem easier to solve.
We need to put more time and attention into educating our public-school teachers, and we need to stop blathering on about educating our children, and do it. As we know from experience with prep schools and public schools for the affluent, money will be required. We need to restore our state university system and cut the in-state tuitions to what a student can make working in the summer.
We can’t have 1.3 million people working at the federal minimum wage. They need food stamps. How can they be consumers? The same goes for those earning nine dollars an hour. Let’s pretend that they have been to war and get them educated.
Wouldn’t it be great to come up from this ash-heap that is the current United States — I know, private Valhallas for five-hundred thousand who make over a million dollars a year — send all of our young people to state universities, then have another period of growing, and creating something other than gadgets and apps and enhancements for Facebook, things that are useful no one has thought of. (I realize that Silicon Valley is making the Fortune 500 more efficient, that computing is faster and faster, that one day it might be secure; I still think the Valley is just a few groups of nerds, unconscious of most of the country.)
Too many billions of dollars are going into the Valley, which probably is ahead of where we need it to be; and the many zillions of shares that trade every day at mock-12 — that also is likely enough.
I, who two weeks ago could not vote for a knee-jerk liberal like Elizabeth Warren, now consider her a milquetoast. I’m not in a mood to regulate, but more in a mood for raiding. I’m casting about, looking for a leader with a sharp mind like hers but a big and booming voice who will make my rude demands.
President Reagan started this thirty-five years ago and since then trillions of dollars have been given to people who contribute to PAC’s. That is quite a problem, which will be hard to surmount.
We have to have people with both the vision to see what has happened and what has to be done, and the courage to articulate that to the voters. The hope for now is that the Republicans overplay their hand and overturn the Affordable Care Act, eliminate food stamps along with a grant themselves a host of their favorite wishes.
That ought to do it. We might get our groundswell, our chance to take over and put this country to rights.