Saturday, May 22, 2010

Nice article skewering decifit-hawking

Read the article here.

What's all this "we" when people talk about the deficit? It's not as though Goldman Sachs talks in terms of "we" when they're deciding how to divide up quarterly profits. As Joel Geier put it in a recent ISR article, "The debt bubble has not be solved, it has merely been transferred from private hands to the state... The state nationalized private capitalist debt". Large capitalist firms externalized the costs of their risky speculative behaviors by moving their toxic assets from their rolls to the state. But they sure aren't externalizing their profits any time soon.

It's not as though there isn't lots of wealth in this society: the annual amount spent "rescuing" ailing financial institutions on the one hand, and in useless foreign occupation and war on the other, is enough to fully fund, many times over, things lie single-payer, plug state budget shortfalls, etc.

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