Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
President Barack Obama looks on after announcing he is keeping Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke for a second term, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009, during a news conference in Oak Bluffs, Mass. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Question:
Who will pay for this?
Answer:
Wall Street will make the working class pay.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Question:
What will this do to the standard of living of working people?
Answer:
Debt equals poverty... think about what this huge debt will mean for you.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Question:
Who will profit from this debt?
Answer:
Wall Street bankers
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Question:
Who created this mess?
Answer:
Wall Street coupon clippers
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Question:
Why should the working class pay--- with a deterioration in its standard of living--- to clean up a mess workers had no part in creating?
Answer:
Because we lack political and economic power.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Comment: Let the Wall Street bankers and coupon clippers pay to clean up the mess they created.
Comment:
$9 trillion over next decade and not one single problem working people are experiencing has been solved... talk about your ass-backward priorities
Comment:
There is no longer any question who Barack Obama is working for: Wall Street.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
The solution: We need to build a very broad, united people's front struggling for a real program for change which must include:
1. Real progressive health care reform with a combination of a vastly expanded public health care sector... no fees/no premiums, comprehensive, all-inclusive, cradle to grave universal health care; publicly funded, publicly administered and publicly delivered combined with single-payer universal health care as the first step towards a fully-funded socialized health care system for all based upon the principles embodied in Social Security.
2. A long-term moratorium on all home foreclosures and evictions... pay-off the mortgages of working people to the tune of the amount the Wall Street bankers have been subsidized, and cancel all student debt for working class students--- the middle class, small business and the wealthy can afford to pay their own way.
3. Free public child care for all working class families; the middle class, small business and the wealthy can afford to pay their own way.
4. Raise the minimum wage to a real living wage based upon the scientific calculations using actual cost-of-living factors as determined by the United States Department of Labor and its Bureau of Labor Statistics. Anyone knows that poverty will never be eliminated as long as employers are allowed to pay working people poverty wages. Any employer not wanting to pay workers real living wages for work that needs to be done should do the jobs themselves.
5. Affirmative action must be aggressively enforced to counter the extreme poverty on Indian Reservations and in communities of color as well as for women because otherwise, with a country sinking into the morass of bankruptcy mired in $9 trillion dollars of debt poverty is going to soar--- further--- out of control on Indian Reservations and in communities of color and families headed by single mothers will see child poverty and all the ensuing misery and despair spiral completely beyond control. Barack Obama oversees a massive economic and governmental apparatus that is nothing but a web held together by institutionalized racism and this web must be torn asunder once and for all... strict enforcement of affirmative action programs is the surest way to put an end to racism.
We must wrest social, political and economic power from the hands of the military-financial-industrial complex if we are going to turn our country around.
The time has come to once-and-for-all beat swords into plowshares... Let the generals hold the baked-goods sales and sell candy bars door-to-door to finance their military insanity, boondoggles and imperialist wars.
The time has come to shut down the more than 800 U.S. foreign military bases dotting the globe and use our precious human and natural resources to establish 800 public health care centers across our own country.
Barack Obama and his Wall Street masters have bankrupted our country and there isn't even a single thing of benefit to working people to show for this.
We need a people's lobby to win a people's bailout... the longer we delay action the worse this situation becomes by the day...
When Barack Obama was campaigning for election; did you ever think that his message of "hope" and "change" was going to result in this kind of a nightmare?
We are now staring a situation in the face where Barack Obama is feeding us a line of bull that our taxes will not increase as city, county and state governments intend to slash funding to the bone and make us pay for those services that used to be provided for free for the common good... before long we will be paying to borrow books from our public libraries--- if they have the funds to remain open... this is the direction our country is headed.
Capitalism is on the skids to oblivion and we are well down the short, bumpy road to perdition. No one with an ounce of common sense continues traveling down such a dangerous road knowing what awaits them at the end.
Remember: Debt equals poverty.
Working people will pay and suffer the cost of this $9 trillion dollar debt; Wall Street bankers will profit from this $9 trillion dollar debt.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Something is terribly out of whack in our country as anyone with common sense can tell... obviously the Democrats don't know the difference between "fair" and "fare;" give them a dictionary, not your vote... we are sorely in need of a real progressive political party based on the legacy and traditions of the socialist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
What Barack Obama and the Wall Street bankers and coupon clippers have done to our country in plunging us into this huge debt that will completely destroy what remains of our standard of living is nothing short of treason.
For weeks we have been getting economic reports coming out of the White House from Barack Obama prepared by Rosy Scenario and now this economic ticking, time-bomb has been dropped:
Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade
Aug 25, 2009
By JIM KUHNHENN
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion - more than the sum of all previous deficits since America's founding. And it says by the next decade's end the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy.
But before President Barack Obama can do much about it, he'll have to weather recession aftershocks including unemployment that his advisers said Tuesday is still heading for 10 percent.
Overall, White House and congressional budget analysts said in a brace of new estimates that the economy will shrink by 2.5 to 2.8 percent this year even as it begins to climb out of the recession. Those estimates reflect this year's deeper-than-expected economic plunge.
The grim deficit news presents Obama with both immediate and longer-term challenges. The still fragile economy cannot afford deficit-fighting cures such as spending cuts or tax increases. But nervous holders of U.S. debt, particularly foreign bondholders, could demand interest rate increases that would quickly be felt in the pocketbooks of American consumers.
Amid the gloomy numbers on Tuesday, Obama signaled his satisfaction with improvements in the economy by announcing he would nominate Republican Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The announcement, welcomed on Wall Street, diverted attention from the budget news and helped neutralize any disturbance in the financial markets from the high deficit projections.
The White House Office of Management and Budget indicated that the president will have to struggle to meet his vow of cutting the deficit in half in 2013 - a promise that earlier budget projections suggested he could accomplish with ease.
"This recession was simply worse than the information that we and other forecasters had back in last fall and early this winter," said Obama economic adviser Christina Romer.
The deficit numbers also could complicate Obama's drive to persuade Congress to enact a major overhaul of the health care system - one that could cost $1 trillion or more over 10 years. Obama has said he doesn't want the measure to add to the deficit, but lawmakers have been unable to agree on revenues that would cover the cost.
What's more, the high unemployment is expected to last well into the congressional election campaign next year, turning the contests into a referendum on Obama's economic policies.
Republicans were ready to pounce.
"The alarm bells on our nation's fiscal condition have now become a siren," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "If anyone had any doubts that this burden on future generations is unsustainable, they're gone - spending, borrowing and debt are out of control."
Even supporters of Obama's economic policies said the long-term outlook places the federal government on an unsustainable path that will force the president and Congress to consider politically unpopular measures, including tax increases and cuts in government programs.
"The numbers today portend the biggest budget fight we've probably had in decades in the United States," said Stan Collender, a former congressional budget official.
The summer analyses by the White House budget office and by the Congressional Budget Office reached similarly bleak conclusions. The CBO's 10-year deficit figure was smaller - $7 trillion - but that is because it assumes that all tax cuts put into place in the administration of former President George W. Bush will expire on schedule by 2011. Obama's budget baseline, however, hews to his proposal to keep the tax cuts in place for families earning less than $250,000 a year.
Both budget offices see the national debt - the accumulation of annual budget deficits - as more than doubling over the next decade. The public national debt, made up of amounts the government owes to the public, including foreign governments, stood Tuesday at a staggering $7.4 trillion. White House budget officials predicted it would reach $17.5 trillion in 2019, or 76.5 percent of the gross domestic product. That would be the highest proportion in six decades.
Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf said if Congress doesn't reduce deficits, interest rates are likely to rise, hurting the economy. But if Congress acts too soon, the economic recovery - once it arrives - could be thwarted.
"We face perils in acting and perils in not acting," Elmendorf told reporters.
David Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office, said the numbers illustrated the need for a national commission that would review spending and taxing options and present lawmakers with a deficit reduction plan that Congress could approve or reject.
"We're going to have to do a hard course correction once we turn the corner on the economy," Walker, now president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, said.
Both Romer and Obama budget director Peter Orszag said this year's contraction would have been far worse without money from the $787 billion economic stimulus package that the president pushed through Congress as one of his first major acts.
At the same time, the continuing stresses on the economy have, in effect, increased the size of the stimulus package because the government will have to spend more in unemployment insurance and food stamps, Orszag said. He said the cost of the stimulus package - which spends most of its money in fiscal year 2010 - will grow by tens of billions of dollars above the original $787 billion.
The White House also credited the $3 billion cash-for-clunkers auto program for contributing to recent economic growth.
Orszag, anticipating backlash over the deficit numbers, conceded that the long-term deficits are "higher than desirable." The annual negative balances amount to about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, a number that many economists say is unsustainable.
But Orszag also argued that overhauling the health system would reduce health care costs and address the biggest contributor to higher deficits.
"I know there are going to be some who say that this report proves that we can't afford health reform," he said. "I think that has it backward."
At the same time, 10-year budget projections can be "wildly inaccurate," said Collender, now a partner at Qorvis Communications. Collender noted that there will be five congressional elections over the next 10 years and any number of foreign and domestic challenges that will make actual deficit figures very different from the estimates.
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Associated Press writers Christopher S. Rugaber, Tom Raum and Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
Books for real change.
Suggested reading list for working people:
Super Profits and Crisis by Victor Perlo
Working Class USA by Gus Hall
Writings of Frank Marshall Davis by Frank Marshall Davis
The People's Front by Earl Browder
Marx and Engels Selected Works
Twilight of World Capitalism by William Z. Foster
For a real understanding of what the American revolution was about, read Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast.
Let's talk about the politics and economics of livelihood... and working class political action.
This is YOUR future...
Alan L. Maki
Check out my main blog:
http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/
