Re: [Pen-l] Obama , getting money to the working class pronto

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 6, 2009, at 3:23 PM, Max Sawicky wrote:

> All I've heard are crickets chirping re: the stunning O-budget.

<http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/radio-commentary-february-28-2009/ 
>

The outlines of the first draft of Obama’s first budget, though, are  
more encouraging. To start with, it’s an honest document, which brings  
the cost of war onto the budget, instead of being covered with the  
phony emergency resolutions that Bush preferred. Raising taxes on the  
very rich is a good move. It’s good to see some serious action on  
greenhouse gas emissions, though I’d much prefer a carbon tax to a cap- 
and-trade system.

(This is a rare instance where I come down on the side of economists  
on an issue. Economists argue that carbon taxes produce much more  
stable and predictable paths for energy prices over the long term,  
while cap-and-trade systems, which allow polluters to buy and sell  
their rights to foul the atmosphere, tend to produce a great deal of  
price volatility. Enviros usually prefer the caps, because they’re  
direct and mandatory. But the price volatility that such systems give  
rise to can make it very difficult to plan for the future. But this is  
a topic for many other shows. See also this article: Cooler Elites.)

The health care fund, $630 billion over the next decade, is a nice  
gesture, but it’s still not what we really need, which is a single- 
payer system. We’ll hear more on this from David Himmelstein in about  
25 minutes, but single-payer is the only way you can get universal  
coverage and cost control, because you get the parasitical insurance  
companies out of the picture.

The deficit is going to be big, very big. It was strange to read on  
the World Socialist Web Site that these deficits are dangerous; their  
analysis sounded eerily like those of deficit hawks like Pete Peterson  
and the Concord Coalition. (Actually it’s more hawkish than this.)  
Either we have big deficits or everything goes down the drain. Of  
course if you want the economy to go down the drain, then you don’t  
like big deficits.

But after the emergency passes—assuming it does, that is—it’s time to  
get serious about soaking the rich to pay down some of the debt  
incurred in this vast rescue operation. I’ve long maintained that  
borrowing money from the rich, which is what deficit spending  
fundamentally does, is a very poor substitute for taxing them. Big  
deficits are an essential strategy for getting out of a crisis. But  
they’re not a good way to run an economy over the long term.

Putting all this together: the budget looks like bigger than baby  
steps in the right direction, the first serious signs at the fiscal  
level of a reversal of the priorities of the last 30 years. But only a  
beginning. And it has to get through Congress.

Oh, and we talk a lot about trillions of dollars. This is, when you  
stop to think about it, an almost unthinkable number. Here’s an  
approximation of a trillion. If you counted out a hundred dollar bill  
every second, it would take 317 years to reach a trillion._______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l