The Republican-controlled Senate adjourned for the weekend without extending unemployment benefits. But they easily passed the War Department’s budget (with help from Senate Dems) along with the Democratic House. Three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
That’s just for this year. Next year they get another three-quarters of a trillion. At least.
What this will mean is another card removed from the house of cards economic system we suffer under. Suffering on the part of families as well as a risk to the system as a whole.
Why? Because of consumer spending, writ large.
I have to say writ large since there are willfully half-blind commentators out there arguing that consumer spending does not support the US economy. We are all familiar with the 70% figure that generally refers to that part of the economy stimulated by consumers; that’s people like you and me. You can trust that number, more or less, and thus trust that when people don’t have money to spend, the overall economy suffers.
How can you trust it? By remembering a basic fact about our government: it is almost wholly supported by working people. The money the government spends on everything from Medicare and Social Security to War comes from….us, in the form of taxes. Taxes are what we pay when we buy things and when we have jobs. Taxes are certainly not coming from rich people, who don’t actually pay taxes anymore, thanks to all parties concerned.
The government doesn’t collect enough in taxes to run itself, so it prints money, which it then circulates in the economy. But, of course, that’s made-up money, funny money, which ends up mostly in rich people’s pockets who, in spite of cries to the contrary, don’t spend it. They invest it in the stock market.
That’s the news from Washington. In other news, we have in the US perhaps the world’s worst response to the virus (we’re number one!). We are showing classic signs of self-loathing. First, family troubles: check; our brothers and sisters are wearing weapons instead of masks. Second, society troubles: check; our government apparently wants us to be at each other’s throats. Third, too much ego: check; Trump.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some other country—almost any other country maybe other than Brazil—could step in like a family member and intervene to help us out?
When 9–11 happened, it was my understanding that the world reached out to us to express its sympathy. But that was not intended to tell us something like, “The US is so exceptional that this should never have happened.” Instead I understood the sympathy to mean, “We’re sorry this happened to you; it’s unfortunately the price of life in our world, and we’ll do everything to help you—and all of us—not to let it happen again.”
But like a child taught by parents he or she is so special that any injury is an injustice, we misread the sympathy and let loose our inner bully. Ever since then we’ve been on a pretty much straight-line path toward self-destruction.
So I’m willing to be among those voices asking for help.
Help!