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:: 9.16.2003 ::
I saw some of Bill Maher's show last night, with Jesse Ventura and Paul Krugman and some columnist I'd never heard of... Krugman is great, I heard him on NPR last week talking about the Bush administration's seeming unconcern for the effects of a ballooning deficit. Now a short-term deficit is not much of a problem, economically, but as Krugman explained to Terry Gross, eventually the people who finance the deficit, those who buy government bonds, will stop buying bonds because they will stop trusting that the government will be able to honor them, and the US will be forced to borrow at usurious interest rates, spiralling further and further into debt. He says we have 3 options: either we have to increase taxes (and therefore governtment revenue) back to pre-cut levels, or we have to make huge cuts to all the social safety nets financed by the federal government, or the US economy will eventually collapse. And he alleges that this administration is intentionally "starving the beast" in order to get rid of US entitlement programs permanently, while pretending to be interested in protecting Social Security and Medicare etc. because of course if they were honest about their intentions they would never have gotten elected.
Now here's the question: how can these people go this course? What do they think is going to be the long-term effect of this? Have they not thought about it at all? An interesting tidbit he revealed: if you go to the back of the budget, you'll find a chart projecting the deficit into the future - and it just continues on its present course, proving that they know at least the immediate effect of their actions. Here's an email I sent to a friend of mine on the subject:i can totally believe it's all on purpose - i certainly don't believe that they (whoever they are) have no clue, esp. after hearing about that chart hidden at the back of the bugdet. but i find myself asking the same question terri did, and not coming up with a satisfactory answer - how can they do this on purpose? do they just not care what happens to the country, to their children, when this policy has run its course? do they think they and their children will be immune of repurcussions, and fuck everyone else? do they believe, as mr. krugman suggested, that it will all somehow magically right itself? or are they really so shortsighted that they're not even interested in looking past the immediate and obvious results of their actions, i.e. the end of US social programs for the foreseeable future? What do you think?
Those of you in the Bay Area can see+hear Paul Krugman in a few weeks in Berkeley. Thanks to Peter for the heads-up.
:: Deb 12:49 PM :: permalink ::
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