Unfortunately, this all seems so familiar: lies that lead to death and misery for millions of people. We’ve seen it with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—and no one reading this needs a recounting of that travesty. To me, the domestic economic equivalent of a purely absurd, immoral policy is the obsession over the debt and deficit “crisis.”
Which is to say: welcome to the first of a series of posts to coincide with the release of the Second Edition of “It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis”
To me, the domestic economic equivalent of a purely absurd, immoral policy is the obsession over the debt and deficit “crisis.”
There is not “crisis.” Not even a little one.
Yet, here we are, two years down the road of a bi-partisan chorus about the need to “tighten the built”, to cut spending, the eviscerate social programs—all in the name of some made-up crisis.
Two years ago, I wrote the first version of the e-book. I’m release this new edition on the eve of the president’s State of the Union address, an updated, expanded version of the book.
When I began writing the first edition of this book more than two years ago, the foolish Commission appointed by the president to tackle the phony debt and deficit “crisis” had just had its first meeting. For the good of the people, it would have been a blessing had it not met. But, the good of the people is not, unfortunately, a guiding principle in this debate.
Instead, at a cost to taxpayers of millions of dollars, the Commission—officially known as the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”—ejected a putrid pile of documents that were ushered, on a red-carpet of journalistic irresponsibility and inside Washington blathering, to the mountain top of other great ideas that became conventional wisdom at great cost to the American people: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, housing prices would always go up, the Dow would reach 30,000, Alan Greenspan was a Great Oracle of financial stewardship and, icing on the cake, Bernie Madoff was an investing genius.
The Commission, which is discussed in further depth in this edition, begat a Congressional “supercommittee”, which, when it failed, begat a deal that would lead to the country’s elites foisting another useless term upon the people, the “fiscal cliff”.
This revision, which includes three new chapters, takes us up to the story today, a time when we may witness a catastrophic gutting of basic social programs—a gutting that is entirely unnecessary but will be blessed by a bi-partisan chorus.
It continues to be a mind-boggling spectacle, frankly: an entire political system in the grips of a conversation about a “crisis” that does not exist, while the real crisis of joblessness, poverty, and Wall Street criminality get shoved to the side.
So, the on-going saga of the foolish, immoral economic pillaging of the American people by a bi-partisan chorus of politicians and elites
continues.
The only question left is: what will the people do?
