This is a reply to the comment from ttroszkowski. I'm sure there's another way to talk back and forth, but a post will work just fine until I find the better method. First of all, thank you so very much for your comment.
I'm a small business owner, so I think in terms of investment, and might step out of the Keynesian box. We certainly are not in a period of surplus. However, I think of the $660 billion just voted for the Pentagon as a sunken cost, money that is as good as spent already. I would like to see that money invested in constructive, productive equipment that would enable middle-class individuals to own the hardware of energy production. We can close a few foreign bases of the 775 existing ones without any loss of our security. That manpower which is already on the federal payroll can be much better invested in building our domestic production. The Pentagon contracts for the material of warfare can be redirected towards producing the fixtures needed to make individual homeowners primary producers of electricity.
As a farmer, I take the risk of going into debt in order to buy molasses for my cows during the winter. Hopefully, this investment will enrich my herd, and the whole business operation will benefit. I am very careful with debt, my own and also our national debt. But I feel that we must feed and heal our starved economy.
I have no problems with cutting spending for the military. I totally believe we have a large military industrial complex which is a large part of the fascism we see in our government today. I believe after much study though that our great country will go bankrupt. There is a time for stimulus spending and that time was long ago. Once a country reaches 90% debt to GDP, this is a study you can google about, it is past the point of no return on declaring bankruptcy. We not only don't have money for huge military largesse, we don't have money for entitlement programs people have paid for. The best estimates from the most aggressive cutters (Ron Paul by far the most aggressive of any candidate running) would give us a balanced budget within 5 years. That amount of time doesn't even take into account any potential terrorist attacks or massive weather related events increasingly on the rise. As difficult as it is to embrace, Austrian economics has it right. The economy must be cleansed through capitalism, the best judge of winners and losers. Had the government not intervened, it would have been catastrophic as it needed to be. Big banks should have failed. Fat cat CEO's should have been punished by losing their jobs and government should have changed the laws to allow more of them to be personally sued for their fraudulent and gross negligence actions. Every delay the government enacts (stimulus, money printing, tax cuts) only makes the inevitable reckoning that much more painful. The day of economic reckoning is coming. I think there is a good chance it will come this year. If you haven't read Aftershock, I highly recommend it. It is an apolitical book based on the theory the govt/fed reserve have made 6 bubbles. It gives ideas on the outcome of what will happen when the last of the bubbles, the dollar and government debt pop. What should have been a cleansing mild recession years ago, what would have been a mild depression in 2008 will be a monster depression dwarfing the Great Depression when government can no longer paper over the problems capitalism is designed to cleanse over time. I don't think it will be all gloom and doom. I think many good things will come out of this change. I think buying local, going back to victory gardens, tight-knit communities, people returning to their places of worship, people bonding together with their families when the government is no longer available for support.....these will be the good. Higher crime, high unemployment, temporary disruptions to the food supply will be the bad. I hope I'm wrong. I hope all the people I have read are wrong but yet many prepare just in case. It's a gut feeling something has gone terribly wrong. We all know it and we've trusted both parties in the last 10 years to fix it and they haven't. They've both made it worse. Check out silverbearcafe.com if you are interested in reading alternative market research people and economists. I don't trust the mainstream media anymore for information or numbers. You will find a lot of great information on there.
ReplyDeleteHi tt,
ReplyDeleteI hope I've got the technical part of the reply right. I think we're exactly on the same page as far as the state we as a country (and world) are in right now and as far as the state of the future will be. This huge overhead system is too expensive and ineffective and the system itself has built-in inability to fix. Where we differ is the transition from where we are to where we will be. I think we should take all the cash we can get hold of and put into place those things that will make life better in the future. Since we're going to spend it anyway on the military. I want to make the transition from the way it is now to the way it will be in the future as painless as possible for ordinary people. The improvements I would put into people's homes would make them producers of electricity, rather than simply consumers of everything. The hope is to bring as much of the means of production down to the grassroots of homes, neighborhoods, and communities of neighborhoods. Then, when the crash comes, rebuilding will be ever so much easier, faster--less harsh.
If I may chime in here, the government won't hesitate to cut social spending before Pentagon spending because they have the police, the army, and various mercenary armies, er, private military contractors to deal with the masses if need be. If they don't fund the Pentagon, how can they remain in power? Department of Homeland Security coordinated the police shutdowns of the Occupy encampments, so this shows the State views Occupy as a threat, i.e. the progenitor of a peoples movement.
ReplyDeleteThe government doesn't need the post office, Amtrak, fish & game, the FDA, USDA, of any of the various agencies they've got who don't have tanks. But let them lose control of the army and police and watch how fast they topple. How would they enforce the thousands of laws they've got on the books? To say nothing of collecting taxes. This is the real reason they spend money on the Pentagon like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store. They're not in the least threatened by a bunch of part-time guerillas in the Hindu Kush. They're also not really threatened by Iran since, by now, we've probably got all their major cities targeted by just a fraction of our ICBM force. The Pentagon exists to keep them in power and project that power.
But the flip side of the coin is many governments think this way. The Shah thought he was safe in power. Well, he thought wrong. The last premier of South Vietnam thought he was safe and even had the U.S. military to back him. Didn't work out so well for him. It only takes a few days of nationwide nonviolent mass civil disobedience with troops and police refusing to intervene to create major change.