Weekend Economists Rise Again August 10-12, 2012

[Demeter]

2. The Romney / Obama Diversion: Say Goodbye to Social Security by ROB URIE

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/03/say-goodbye-to-social-security/

In a New York Times editorial ( http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/12/opinion/recession-why-worry.html?src=pm ) written in 1993 the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith made a point that seems to have been lost on subsequent generations—many in the economic elite benefit from the destitution of others. Even more to the point, activist government could put the unemployed back to work tomorrow, but at a cost to the elite. By tying economic policies long known to work to competing economic interests, Dr. Galbraith explained the current conundrum. Economies in the West aren’t working because a small economic elite benefits from this state of affairs.

With Barack Obama, of his own initiative, slated to begin cutting government expenditures in 2013 (should he be re-elected), a number of his liberal and progressive supporters have taken to granting that the Federal budget ‘crisis,’ to which he purports to be responding, is real. In fact, the ‘debate’ was preceded by forty years of policies designed to systematically de-fund government, reduce labor to a beggar class and to gut any public programs that don’t specifically and directly make the rich richer. To pretend that this is other than a manufactured ‘crisis’ designed to shift more public resources to the already rich is to misread history.

Apparently unbeknownst to many, the working class in America has been living with austerity economics for forty years now. Since the 1970s the proportion of what American labor is paid relative to what it produces has been declining, as have the effective tax rates on corporations and the wealthy. With corporations and the rich who own them receiving a larger proportion of what labor produces and paying less in taxes, there is now little left to pay for necessary social programs such as schools, health care and pensions. But this shortfall is no accident. It is the intended result of four decades of policies specifically designed to enrich the ruling class at the expense of labor, the middle class and the poor.

In modern history the shift of social wealth from labor to the ruling class began in earnest with Democrat Jimmy Carter in the White House in the late-1970s. A series of politically motivated oil embargoes quite predictably led the oil-dependent manufacturing economy to rising prices and lower output—stagflation. Through arcane theory still practiced by the American economic mainstream, the cause—the oil embargoes with attendant rising prices and reduced output, was converted to effect, as if from over-regulation and Keynesian management of the capitalist economy. The proposed solutions derived from these (implausible) economic theories were de-regulation, the destruction of labor’s bargaining power and the return to (long discredited) ‘market’ solutions to policy issues....

MUCH MORE AT LINK