Delivering a New Deal to the American People
This is taken from Prof. Heather’s June 15, 2023, Letters from an American. It begs the question of why can there not be another New Deal for Americans?
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.
The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.
That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.
So why is there a growing debt?
Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.
“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
Crumbs falling off the table, trickle down economics. It has yet to work and it will not work this time around if Repubs get there way. Groundhog Day continuous repeating the same scenario over and over again.
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI1Il1dfQ==
May 25, 2023
Defense spending was 55.6% of federal government consumption and
investment in January through March 2023. *
$967.0 / $1,739.9 = 55.6%
Defense spending was 20.8% of all government consumption and
investment in January through March 2023.
$967.0 / $4,654.9 = 20.8%
Defense spending was 3.7% of GDP in January through March 2023.
$967.0 / $26,486.3 = 3.7%
* Billions of dollars
[ Find me a single Democrat in Congress who is willing to limit military spending at this time, and rather increase social welfare spending. ]
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI1Il1dfQ==
March 30, 2023
Defense spending was 56.2% of federal government consumption and
investment in 2022 *
$924.9 / $1,646.7 = 56.2%
Defense spending was 20.8% of all government consumption and investment in 2022
$924.9 / $4,448.1 = 20.8%
Defense spending was 3.6% of GDP in 2022
$924.9 / $25,462.7 = 3.6%
* Billions of dollars
Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress in 1932 were committed to sharp social welfare spending increases, and even with opposition from Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court, the President and Democrats fought for “socializing” America.
[ Find me a single Democrat in Congress who is willing to limit military spending at this time, and rather increase social welfare spending. ]
I am pretty sure any of us could find a number of Democrats willing to do just that. I am pretty sure I can use one hand to count the number of Republicans willing to do the same. If fact I am pretty sure I could still toss a football to my kids with that same hand with no adjustments needed.
[ Find me a single Democrat in Congress who is willing to limit military spending at this time, and rather increase social welfare spending. ]
“I am pretty sure any of us could find a number of Democrats willing to do just that.”
According to the recent votes on debt and budget in the House and Senate, I cannot identify a single Democratic protest vote. No arguing, but military spending will be increasing and social welfare spending will be constrained for years to come given the votes that were just completed.
I guess this is all true enough, but it is not exactly intelligent.
The important question is not “what percent” or even “how much”, but “what is needed, where, and how well is it being spent.
You might have had me on defense spending before Putin invaded Ukraine and threatened to nuke the world. Now, I think I can see the importance of “enough” defense spending….and as far as I can tell “defense” spending is not zero-sum. It is called military Keynesianism for a reason [without government spending it is not at all clear we would have an economy above depression levels, not to mention the spinoff from defense to all the plastic goodies we can’t live without.
Meanwhile, it’s not so much the R’s are evil [they are] but they are stupid. Listen to them talk: it’s pure gibberish, but as long as they call for lower taxes, pFreedom to do whatever we want without government “interference” and yes, god, motherhood, and apple pie, they can always find voters who tink they are god’s right arm on earth.
Meanwhile we have “the Left” calling for spending money on new roads and bridges and faster, more powerful electric cars to fight global warming, funded by “tax incentives.” And of course, “reparations” because that is the best way to help the poor, don’t you know.
We could have “medicare for all” but people won’t pay the extra taxes, they’d rather spend twice as much on private insurance as god intended. or “make the rich pay” for Social Security because it has worked so well for eighty plus years “worker paid” as Roosevelt warned us was the only way to keep “damned politicians from taking it away from them.”
Nope, just run around in circles yelling “less money for them, more money for us. never mind the details.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/debt-ceiling-deal/
May 30, 2023
The Debt Deal Is a Tragedy
The debt-limit agreement entrenches long-term austerity. It was a huge GOP win.
By James K. Galbraith
Two men emerged from the Oval Office. One of them, President Joe Biden, said of the deal they’d just reached that it “reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone.”
The other, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said that the deal will bring “historic reductions in spending, consequential reforms that will lift people out of poverty into the workforce, rein in government overreach.”
Contrary to the president, the deal will not “grow the economy.” Contrary to the speaker, it will not “lift people out of poverty.” It spares the military, veterans, Social Security, and Medicare, focusing cuts and caps on non-defense, discretionary spending—which, as the Center for American Progress has explained, includes many of the most “essential programs.” Those cuts accumulate, and—as population grows and prices rise—they will be steep. True, the spending caps apply for only two years, but then the debt ceiling will come up again, and they will likely be renewed. The precedent has been set. Speaker McCarthy is right: The cuts are historic. The deal means austerity for the long term. It is a huge Republican win….
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/business/economy/federal-debt-32-trillion.html
June 16, 2023
U.S. National Debt Tops $32 Trillion for First Time
The milestone follows a recent congressional showdown over lifting the debt ceiling. Another spending fight looms this year.
By Alan Rappeport
usa debt keeps growing, bc federal spending too much
and what the govt buys has negative impact on growth
fed pause suggests the choice btw growth and inflation is being made.
paddy:
We can always reverse the trump tax breaks to people and corporations. The former will reverse and pay for the later. This tax break was done under congressional reconciliation.
Re “democracies”
Any alleged expert or layperson who talks about “democracies” AS IF a real democracy ACTUALLY EXISTS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD (or has existed at any time in ‘human civilization’) is evidently repeating mindlessly and blindly the propaganda fed to them since they were a kid and/or is part of the (unconscious, ignorant, naive, willful) crowd who disseminates this total lie because any “democracy” of ‘human civilization’ has always been a covert structure of the rule of a few over the many operating behind the pretense name and facade of a “democracy”: “Democracy” — Another Untruth of the 2 Married Human Pink Elephant Cult(ure)
“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. […]. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies […]. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable laws of business. The world is a business […].” — from the 1976 movie “Network”
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice
In terms of “experts” or “awake” folks who sell you the fake program of democracies…
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
Isn’t it about time for anyone to wake up to the ULTIMATE DEPTH of the human rabbit hole — rather than remain blissfully willfully ignorant in a narcissistic fantasy land and play victim like a little child?
“We’ll know our Disinformation Program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” —William Casey, a former CIA director=a leading psychopathic criminal of the genocidal US regime
“Separate what you know from what you THINK you know.” — Unknown