Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Grandkids Lament

Think of it this way.  An old white GOP member of Congress decides he needs a new $5 million dollar house.  He buys it with a huge mortgage.  He works the deal so that his grandchildren have to pay off the debt after he his dead.  That way he gets all the rewards and they get bankruptcy and then start living in a third world nation.

That is the tax cut viewed in a different way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why does it have to be an old white GOP member? Kind of a racist slant.

Anonymous said...

You are correct.

And to expand on your thought, the granddad enjoying all the rewards is one person, but is also one of an economic class, the filthy rich, as we used to call them, the ruling class, that collectively owns our politicians and makes all the decisions, directly and indirectly, about the economy. They basically control the country.

We grandkids support them entirely, with big tax cuts, by maintaining the infrastructure they do business with, by paying all the taxes because their real tax rates are at or less than zero. We provide them at no cost with a unionless workforce already educated and trained, in high school and college, which more and more is technical job training and less the humanities that teach critical thinking and how to seek fulfillment through the arts and intellectual pursuits instead of by buying things.

This basic setup never changes. They will always take a cut of your earnings in all these ways and take another cut by selling the proceeds of your laborand giving you just enough to keep you coming in. They'll always have as their benefits the best politicians, the best land, the best houses, the best lawyers. We are born bankrupt grandkids and die that way. They always have us in debt and paying interest if only by the cut they take, called profit, from every cent we ever spend.

We could have, just as easily as we have this one, a society in which everyone gets what they need, but we don't have one and aren't trying to get one. We'll never have it until the means of producing everything are held privately and not by society, our community. Collectively owned through the state or some other mechanism. The ruling class cooperates an we could, and used to.

Cooperation is in our nature just as much as competition, but Capitalism brings the competitive part out. We've had it drilled into our heads from birth that we can't act collectively but we do it all the time, as in the club that owns the golf course, or things like the Elks and the American Legion, food co-ops, chambers of commerce. Cooperation for a common interest is common. In this era no one's been very successful at state socialism, however because every time anybody tries they come under immediate, never ending attack by Capitalism which is much more powerful and well organized. But for most of human history we've lived communally, one big family. Tribes are a remnant of that. We have it in our genes to cooperate as much as anything else. If we devoted half the time to making a collective economy work as we do working to make capitalism work we could probably spend half our time at leisure.