This family is not celebrating Wall Street’s successful theft of the American Dream
As Americans we need to look into the mirror and decide what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to be the type of country where the obscenely wealthy make millions upon millions of dollars per year while more people than ever are living in poverty? Do we want to be the type of country where corporations are making more money than ever, while the American worker is working harder for less money?
Some basic economic facts:
In Europe they instituted austerity programs, (cut government spending only) in response to the economic meltdown in 2008.
The Republicans also wanted only spending cuts.
In the U.S. we instituted a mix of stimulus spending, (over Republican objections), and spending cuts in response to the economic meltdown.
Obama and the Democrats wanted stimulus mostly, but accepted some targeted spending cuts.
The Gross Domestic Product, (GDP), in the U.S. shrank in the 4th quarter of 2012 by .1% mostly due to the federal government cutting back on spending:
It has been four years since we had the worldwide economic meltdown. Different countries took different routes to rescue their economies. We now have enough data to see which of these methods worked.
In Europe, they decided that they needed to cut spending on domestic programs to get out of the economic mess they were in.
In America, even though the Republicans insisted on spending cuts only, President Obama knew better and he got some stimulus dollars through Congress.
So lets compare the different methods used and the effectiveness of each method.
From Mother Jones:
“In recent weeks, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have accused each other of being an “outsourcer in chief,” as their campaigns have tussled over Romney’s past at Bain Capital and the (non)release of his tax returns. But all this scuffling hasn’t taken into account an until-now unreported fact about Romney’s days at Bain: When he was running the private equity firm, he invested tens of millions of dollars in a pair of companies that specialized in outsourcing high-tech manufacturing and that developed offshore production facilities in Mexico, China, and elsewhere to build electronics for US firms.
Here is a video of Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, explaining how private equity firms, like the one run by Mitt Romney – Bain Capital – make their profits off of the backs of average Americans.
As if there weren’t enough wasteful things for the politicians in DC to spend our money on, we can now drug test all of the unemployed.
It is as if the Republicans and the right wing in this country think that all of these millions of unemployed people became that way because of something they had done wrong. They are desperately trying to blame anyone for the unemployment problem in this country other than those who should squarely take the blame – large multi-national corporations and the super wealthy/greedy.
