Eric Margolis nails it as usual:
Obama’s total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military “contractors” (mercenaries and workers); and veterans’ costs. Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada’s total defence budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees…
…The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama’s Afghan “surge” of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion — more than Germany’s total defence budget.
No wonder U.S. defence stocks rose after Peace Laureate Obama’s “austerity” budget….
…Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as unemployment heads over 10% and the economy bleeds red ink. America has become the Sick Man of the Western Hemisphere, an economic cripple like the defunct Ottoman Empire.
The Pentagon now accounts for half of total world military spending. Add America’s rich NATO allies and Japan, and the figure reaches 75%….
…There are 750 U.S. military bases in 50 nations and 255,000 service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly 100,000 in Japan and South Korea.
Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at least 44% of tax revenues. During the Bush administration, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — funded by borrowing — cost each American family more than $25,000.
Like Bush, Obama is paying for America’s wars through supplemental authorizations — putting them on the nation’s already maxed-out credit card. Future generations will be stuck with the bill.
Margolis is right. This is how Empires die. It’s not precisely the finances that matter, but what they represent, the gutting of real economic activity and growth for activities which return no real growth or strength. To the military I would add at least three quarters of all financial activity in the US.
A sane policy would be to reduce the US military budget by a half, slash the “intelligence” budget by three quarters (they produce virtually no actionable intelligence not available through public sources), break up the banks and spend money on refitting every building in America, in making education work again, in high speed trains and so on.
But that’s not going to happen.
So yes, Margolis is right, the US is in terminal decline.
And no, it isn’t going to stop till the US crashes out.
I’m not a big fan of the wilderness. My father was a forester, and as a child I was hauled along on enough unpleasant and uncomfortable trips to develop a distaste for jolting pickup truck rides and boring conversations about varieties of trees. The Boy Scouts didn’t improve things—I mainly remember the long nights of slow dripping torment in tents that never, ever, kept the rain out, no matter what you did.
I don’t quite like the deep green, the wet and rotting world of the Pacific rainforest along the west coast. People who haven’t spent much time in it never get the picture right. It can be a hellish world. One of my uncles used to cruise timber spending months in the coastal forests. He would come back slug white and drained by months without seeing the sun. People’s skin would rot. The deep green is a dark world, one where the sun never shines, where fallen trees rot quietly, infested with a world of bugs and grubs – white and black swarming over their repast and home. It rains more days than not, but no matter how strong the rain what you experience below is a slow and absolutely endless and relentless drip, drip, drip till the memory of dryness is faint and the lust for it is your steady companion.
Even as neither day nor night is as beautiful as dawn or dusk—sunrise or sunset—the deep green is most beautiful where it fades into something else—shore or creek or glade. The glades offer blessed sun and relief from the eternal damp and in the right season a profusion of wildflowers. Most creeks don’t offer much sun—the canopy arcs over them, but the bubble and swirl of water over and around smooth round stones and the flash of silver fish languid and quick in the water are some of my favorite sights.
For me, however, it’s as the rainforest thins towards the shore that its true beauty shines. Mostly it’s the combination of water and sun that brings out the beauty. The eternal drip, drip, drip that makes the deep green a rotting hell throws up endless beauty as the canopy thins. I remember a huge fern, taller than a small child, with drops of water that shimmered with the blurred hues of a rainbow, more beautiful than any diamond. Likewise the sun shining through the forest’s roof leaves the forest suffused with a light green glow that is enchanting. It’s a beauty that shows only in the pauses amongst the interminable rain, a few brief shining hours, but it is perhaps more enchanting for its brevity and rarity.
When I moved out East, I traveled through the forest and thought it scrub. Compared to the rain forest of the west coast, normal forests can never compare. They are never green enough, alive enough or thick enough.
To me, forest will always mean the deep green and natural beauty will always be where it sweeps down to shore and thins out on the edge of the sand or rock and the sweet rotting scent of humus is joined to the salt tang of wind off the sea.
(A Reprint)
An acquaintance asked me about this. Here’s the quick answer.
Virtually every tax in the US is regressive except income tax. That is,the more money you make, the less money you you pay as a % of your income. If you replace income tax, the only progressive tax (one where if you make more you pay a higher percentage) then you will have a strongly regressive system. (The system is probably effecitively flat already when you add all taxes/fees together).
Not only does regressivity hurt poorer people, it reduces demand and it increases income inequality. Income inequality is heavily correlated with all sorts of bad outcomes including lower lifespans, higher infant mortality, lower happiness and so on.
Lack of high level progressivity is also a major reason for the financial crisis. What should be done instead of a flat tax is to tax all income over a million at 90%, all income over 5 million at 95%, closing loopholes and so on. It is not a coincidence, or an accident that the US was highly progressive in the 50s or 60s, nor is it an accident that the countries in the world with the happiest citizens (aka. the nordic countries) have high tax rates.
The current system is not fair because of loopholes and special treatment, not because it’s progressive. Those loopholes could be changed under any new tax system, whether highly progressive or flat.
This is actual good economic news:
In the US, the Institute for Supply Management index – a key measure of industrial activity – rose from 54.9 to 58.4, its highest level since August 2004 and well ahead of economists’ expectations…
…he comforting US data followed strong evidence from Asia and Europe that manufacturers are beginning to ramp up production to meet stronger demand.
China reported record industrial activity for the month while the purchasing managers’ indices in India, South Korea and Taiwan also rose strongly.
India’s HSBC PMI rose from 55.6 in December to 57.7 in January, the strongest level since August 2008.
The eurozone’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index rose to 52.4 last month, against 51.6 at the end of 2009.
The next thing to look for is idle shipping capacity being brought back on line. This is still very fragile, mind you, as the stimulus fades, with the Federal Reserve poised to have to buy huge numbers of Treasuries, but I still think we’ll see a hiring recovery in the spring. Not sure how long it’ll last, and it won’t be enough to relieve the huge pain out there, but there should be a recovery of sorts.
Bear in mind that as European and US stimuli fade, those countries will likely fall back into recession, the strength of the world economy will be located primarily in Asia for some time to come, for the simple reason that they are creditor nations and can afford proper stimulus measures.
I’m in the middle of a lot of (paid) work, so posting has been minimal. It may remain that way for a while. Plus, I find I have little to say I haven’t already said. However, a couple random thoughts:
1) the Budget. 100 million new stimulus, some tax cuts. Not awful. But like most of Obama’s initiatives, half-assed and won’t do the job.
2) the Teabagger “contract with America” makes two things clear. First, they want to repeal the 20th century, and second, they want corporate interests to take them for everything they have.
Government exists as a profit center for private enterprise, as I have said many, many times.
In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.
Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.
The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.
Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.
And this is only going to get worse, by the way.
I offer a blast from the past, the post I wrote on Roberts nomination, when it became clear the Democrats weren’t going to fight it… (Oh, and also, for those who think I use impolite language now, read this.)
People are very strange in very many different ways. To me what is strangest about people is how many of them cannot see what is completely obvious. Let’s take the Afghani elections. Some parties weren’t allowed to run. More votes were cast than the entire population of the country, US money was funneled to certain parties, we had reliable reports that registration cards were for sale, we know that bribed power brokers controlled voter registration. So, when the election monitors came back and reported that the election had been free, everyone smiled and patted themselves on their idiot backs. But, of course, even assuming they were right that no ballot boxes had been stuffed in the few ridings they were in, the election was as free as any other election where a foreign power determines what parties are allowed to run, where more people vote than are alive and where regional bosses determine who votes.
The whole Roberts thing is looking very similiar.
Bush has said that he loves Scalia and Thomas and that he would appoint a justice like them.
Roberts has spent a good part of his life working for Republicans in general and for the Bush family in particular. He gave Jeb Bush advice in the 2000 Florida recount (and we can guess, from what happened at the time, that that advice was how to recall the legislature and award the victory to Bush if the Supremes fell down on the job.)
His wife is in charge of a pro-life organization so extreme that they wanted Schiavo kept half-alive in a vegetative state.
He has given George Bush the right to ignore the Geneva conventions, in direct contradiction to the part of the constitution that makes any treaty part of the law of the land.
The rightest of right wing flakes, guys like Dobson and the Family Research Council, have endorsed him.
But because he doesn’t have a lot of judicial opinions he ordered written for him by his clerks we’re supposed to think we don’t know where he stands? We know who loves him. We know who he’s chosen to work with all his life. We know who he sleeps with. We have seen not a single decision from the bench that indicates that any of the other things we know is wrong.
We know he’s a telegenic, smarter, version of Thomas or Scalia – at best, Rhenquist.
Bush and his allies aren’t subtle people. They tell you what they’re going to do, often years in advance, and then they do it. They do this time in, time out. And yet, for some reason, people still don’t believe them.
So let’s bring it back. Any failure to recognize that Roberts is Scalia prettied up is just gutless timidity and an unwillingness to look the facts full in the face. It isn’t some intellectually principled ‘we must wait till all the evidence is in’, it’s the exact opposite – an unwillingness to operate on the strong evidence which already exists.
And compromising on Roberts, being unwilling to filibuster him, is just another way of saying “I don’t really give enough of a fuck about civil liberties, about a woman’s right to control her own body, about the imperial presidency, about habeas corpus, or about torture to put up more than a token fight.”
The filibuster deal was the pre-surrender of 14 “moderates” to the Bush administration. Fighting is too much bother, upholding the constitution and the rules of the Senate is too much trouble, so we’ll just compromise ourselves right now and save everyone from having a real fight on the real issues.
Democrats in Congress are only willing to take on fights they’ve already won. What’s their big victory these days? Oh yeah, saving Social Security. They managed to defend the third rail of American politics. That’s the level they’re reduced to – that their only significant victory of the last five years is keeping the most popular government program in existence going.
But if something requires a bit more of a fight than that, if it requires going out and saying “Roberts sleeps with a woman who thinks that Congress was right to try and keep Terry Schiavo alive against her own wishes and those of her husband”, well they can’t do it.
I mean, it’s not a hard fucking fight. Everyone is acting as if because he has a nice plastic smile and has some actual friends who say actual nice things about him, that he can’t be stopped.
Tie him to the loons who everyone despises – the ones who wanted to keep Terry a zombie, and then burn them together.
And while you’re at it, take out the Fedealist Society. The White House is now saying that Roberts doesn’t “recollect” if he was ever a member – does no one have any fucking killer instinct left? Mock him mercilessly on this. No one forgets such a thing. Use his unwillingness to admit it to destroy both him and the Federalist Society, so that no judge will ever dare join them ever again.
This fight is not only winnable, it is eminently winnable. If someone has the balls to fight, fight hard and fight dirty.
As always there are real consequences to this – real people are going to die and suffer because Roberts makes it to the court. Real women, real girls, may well bleed out in alleyways because of this. Innocent people may go to jail without ever having a chance to face their accusers and the US may go to more wars because Roberts believes that Senate oversight is lese majeste.
But apparently this is just another fight the Dems are going to roll over on. One look at Roberts’ pretty face and their knees went all weak and they decided that the trust they owe those whom they’ve spent the last thirty years promising, “if nothing else, we’ll protect Roe”, means nothing.
Cause hey, their wives, their daughters, will be flown out of the country.
It’s only the little people who’ll pay the price.
And who gives a fuck about them?
President Barack Obama is proposing a tax package aimed at appealing to middle-income Americans, including an increased tax credit for child care and an expansion of tax credits to match retirement savings.
The proposals are intended to fit within the main themes — the economy, jobs and tackling the deficit — the president plans to sound in his State of the Union address on Jan. 27, according to an administration statement.
If at first tax cuts don’t succeed, or the second time, or the tent time, why then, suggest more tax cuts!
One more time, repeat after me. If you pursue bad policy, then you will reap bad results. The job market will not be improved significantly (if at all) by tax cuts, since every dollar a middle class schmuck gets, someone with pricing power (aka, the banks, healthcare industry, etc…) will take away.
Anything that by some miracle isn’t taken away, will be used to pay down debts or saved, and if a few cents are spent, they’ll be spent on crap from China and will generate no appreciable demand for US goods.
Tax cuts do not make the economy better, they certainly do not create jobs worth mentioning, and no, Virginia, they don’t improve the deficit either.
Schmuck. He still thinks he’s Reagan for the 21st century.
