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No, duh!!!
"Billionaire investor Warren Buffett (news - web sites) accused the Bush administration Saturday of pursuing tax cuts that favor large corporations and wealthy individuals.
'If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning,' Buffett said in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual report.
Except for 1983, the percentage of federal tax receipts from corporate income taxes last year was the lowest since data was first published in 1934, Buffett said..."
Exuse the following rant and ramble, but this makes me angry!
The problem with Republican "supply side economics" (another phrase that should be understood to mean "class war"), is that it puts marginal dollars into the hands of a class that is more apt to save their surplus rather than consume it (there are only so many vacation villas, Lexi, bottles of champagne, and liquid-plasma HDTV sets an individual will buy -- the rest is "surplus" available for investment). This might make sense at certain times (when investment dollars are scarce, signaled by high real interest rates), but not now. Here's why:
(1) Real productivity boon. Corporate America learned how to use their massive investment in technology (in the nineties) to truly raise productivity. The net result is a constant rate of goods and services can be produced by fewer people. Given constant demand, this results in fewer jobs.
(2) Globalization. After a couple of centuries of imperialism, USG-sustained two-class repressive Third World political structures, lower or absent occupational safety and environmental regulations, and because of revolutions in technology (communications) and management practices (the JIT paradigm), there are many nations that offer an effective labor pool at a fraction of the costs here in America. Capital is allowed to fly across borders while workers are not. Given constant demand, this results in fewer jobs -- in America, anyway, and this jobs-dampening effect will continue as long as there is a disparity between the standards of living of competing labor pools.
Given the above, the net result in shifting a portion of the flow of funds into the hands of the investor class (the result of GWB tax policies) is to dampen demand, which decreases further the demand for labor; the latter resulting in even more givebacks (in terms of wages and benefits) on those still employed -- in other words, we lock into a negative spiral, the very same crisis in effective demand witnessed at the start of the Great Depression. Bush's jobs record doesn't rival Herbert Hoover's for nothing!
However, I don't think Bush and his henchmen really care. I think instead we are witnessing a "circling of the wagons" of the advantaged classes in face hard limits to expansion. These "hard limits"? Climate change (witness the recently leaked warnings from the Office of Net Assessment). Hubbert's Peak in oil production (effects begin, not when the last drop drips from the spigot, but as soon as peak supply is surpassed -- thereafter, energy prices increasingly consume the resources of society). Drinkable water. Arable land. Bush seeks to protect the position of advantaged classes, their ability to consume, while ignoring the probability that conditions for the rest of us rapidly deteriorate.
Basically Bush is borrowing from future generations to help the top 1% build up their personal financial fortresses now. He even has Greenspan and others floating trial balloons toward cutting future Social Security and Medicare benefits to help close future deficit gaps (acknowledging the unsustainability of our current fiscal arrangements).
So the bottom 40%, who will in the future depend on social security to pay rent and eat, are being sacrificed by Bush so the top 1% can buy a new Lexus today and put a few hundred thousand more into savings for tomorrow. It's the "F*ck you, I've got mine!" Conservative Republican political agenda. If Bush were honest, he'd print that as a slogan on his campaign buttons. Then, maybe, the Republican NASCAR dads would understand what they're voting for.
Bush's motivations (i.e., the people around him) are multifold and complex, but I want to focus on one point: The uber-neo-libertarian believes in unraveling the New Deal social safety net partly to ensure we are all dependent, not on each other, but on the cash nexus made possible by corporate largess. Serfdom and feudalism, in effect; a highly profitable situation to the advantaged classes -- especially as the traditional expansionist avenues to capitalist health will no longer be available. The health of the capitalist will be had on the broken backs of the rest of us.
In ceding democratic sovereignty to the IMF and WTO, and through treaties such as NAFTA and CAFTA, we are ceding our democratic power to the multinational corporate boardroom, and the boardrooms take full advantage of the situation.
Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there
government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and
life and property are his who can take them.
---Thomas Jefferson
That's essentially our choice -- exercise of our democratic will, or else; over the last twenty-plus years, it does not seem we've chosen wisely.
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