I keep hearing about the price tag for healthcare, the economic stimulus, education, advancing alternative energy, mediating global warming, saving the oceans and the rainforests, preserving the environment, putting an end to war. Given that not addressing those issues immediately equates to suicide for the planets human population, and quite a few other species as well, what's that worth to us?
The Republicans spent the last decade spending all the money they could get their greedy hands on. They squandered the Clinton surplus, ran up huge deficits, drove up oil prices and profited on that, started wars and profited on those, saw to it the money went to the have's and have mores and totally ignored all the maintenance that a country needs to survive.
Essentially they left us owing everything we might expect to make if we worked for the next decade doing nothing but paying off their debt.
Our kids aren't going to see it as the Republicans being the bad guys, they are going to blame us for what we did and didn't do and how it affects them. The Obama administration intends to add another decade of indebtedness fixing the stuff the Republicans broke or neglected. As I see it that means the the people who live on this planet have a choice to make.
Either they can choose to be a little less selfish and focus on doing the things that need to be done to put the end times off a while, or they can continue to live comfortable and kiss it all goodby for their kids.
Krugman says we need to spend more faster to stimulate the economy. Its possible he figures the resultant inflation will pay off the debt. I'm seeing it a little differently. Maybe we should replace the word spend with the word invest. The idea of investing is that you get your money to work for you and if you want to you can think of it as a source of energy.
Right now everybody seems to be concerned about jobs, but the concern isn't with what the jobs are, its just what do they pay and does everyone have one or not. I don't see that kind of thinking as a good investment.
If we are employing people to blow shit up, or to provide the explosives to blow shit up, or the delivery systems to get the explosives to where we want to blow shit up that seems like a waste of money to me, given we have other places that we want to spend it. Its possible that what we do is just as important as how much we spend to do it.
The argument that if we stop blowing shit up we will put people out of work and wreck the economy causes me some concern. I'm concerned because it suggests the think tanks who seem to be drafting our legislation are making the point that when we blow stuff up we also kill people and thus providing some people jobs killing other people gives more bang for the buck in terms of the overall global economy and its unemployment rate.
Now that we have become accustomed to being saddled with a deficit in the ten trillion dollar range and interest payments on it that would pay for the annual budget of a major hospital every day, it still doesn't seem to be occuring to some of us that money isn't the only good reason for doing or not doing anything.