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'Shared Sacrifice' Is for Suckers: 7 Common Sense Thoughts on Washington's Budget Bedlam
The richest 1% have waged war against the rest of us; Now is time to fight back and fight back hard
Washington is careening off the fiscal cliff smack into the debt ceiling. These mind-numbing mixed metaphors are not the currency of a well-governed nation.
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1. The economy is still broken
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2. You can’t “fix the debt” without fixing the economy
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“Shared sacrifice” is for suckers. It is neither just nor sensible to demand sacrifices be shared by the predator and the prey.
***
3. You can’t fix the economy by “fixing the debt”
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4. You can’t “recover” to the old economy
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5. You can’t build by focusing on what to dismantle
We need fundamental reform, a new strategy for the economy that will rebuild the middle class. That involves far different questions than what programs to cut and whose taxes to hike.
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6. Washington needs more Hippocrates and less hypocrisy.
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7. Focus on the predators, not the prey
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In any case, “shared sacrifice” is for suckers. It is neither just nor sensible to demand sacrifices be shared by the predator and the prey. It doesn’t make sense to ask everyone to sacrifice when the top 1 percent has captured 93 percent of the country’s income growth as it did in 2010. It makes no sense to cut spending on everything when long-term deficits are driven by one thing – our broken health care system. And it makes no sense to cut everything without being clear about what we need to build.
***
Washington is careening off the fiscal cliff smack into the debt ceiling. These mind-numbing mixed metaphors are not the currency of a well-governed nation.
***
1. The economy is still broken
***
2. You can’t “fix the debt” without fixing the economy
***
“Shared sacrifice” is for suckers. It is neither just nor sensible to demand sacrifices be shared by the predator and the prey.
***
3. You can’t fix the economy by “fixing the debt”
***
4. You can’t “recover” to the old economy
***
5. You can’t build by focusing on what to dismantle
We need fundamental reform, a new strategy for the economy that will rebuild the middle class. That involves far different questions than what programs to cut and whose taxes to hike.
***
6. Washington needs more Hippocrates and less hypocrisy.
***
7. Focus on the predators, not the prey
***
In any case, “shared sacrifice” is for suckers. It is neither just nor sensible to demand sacrifices be shared by the predator and the prey. It doesn’t make sense to ask everyone to sacrifice when the top 1 percent has captured 93 percent of the country’s income growth as it did in 2010. It makes no sense to cut spending on everything when long-term deficits are driven by one thing – our broken health care system. And it makes no sense to cut everything without being clear about what we need to build.
***
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/03-8
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Americans will buy the most completely outrageous crap anyone can dream up as long as it's packaged nicely and presented to them as something that is reasonable, necessary, something that their betters all have, something that other people want, or something that they need to be safe.
There's a reason that Nigerian Prince is still trying to collect his fortune.
