What could we do with the money we are wasting by throwing it into the financial sector of the economy? With these many billions, we could rebuild the rail system, we could retool Detroit, and the hundreds of towns that have manufacturing plants that feed Detroit. We could end the necessity for taking out loans for going to college and just make it free, we could repair every damned bridge that needs it in the whole country. Instead we are pouring into a rathole. The executives of the financial firms don't plan on losing much.
From MSNBC business section
"Even though the banking sector may be returning to normal, the economy still isn’t. The economy continues to face a host of other problems," said Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at ChannelCapitalResearch.com. "We’re in for a tough ride."
. Well, we are in for something that goes beyond a "tough ride". We are going to be losing our houses, our insurance, our savings, our retirements and we are going to be in hock up to our elbows-but the banking sector will be back to normal.
I think we really need to take a look a what has happened and not just recapitalize the capitalists on their terms.
In my opinion we have a structural problem here. A fundamental problem that is not going to be fixed by just a "jolt to the system" as the guiders of the system seem to think we need. The patient has cancer, and jolting him isn't going to cure that. What we need is an operation. We need to cut out the growth that has threatened to consume us, and that growth is fundamentally that of greed. We must face the fact that there is a class of people amongst us who think that they deserve riches beyond the scale of imagination. When we have faced that fact we have to decide whether they are right. If they are, then we just continue on giving them the fruits of capital-the great increases of productivity over the decades since Reagan have gone into their hands rather than that of labor. If we do not think they deserve that then we must face the requirement to take it away from them and to redistribute it. I think there should be a very high tax rate on any money acquired whether by earnings, dividends, lottery, or finding it in a hole in the ground that is above say half a million bucks a year. Further there should be a very high estate tax that is not deterred by foundations and the like-just because daddy was a billionaire doesn't mean that Sonny boy is going to be by birthright. It sounds like class warfare, and it is.
The choices are stark. We can unionize, work together and help each other and weather this awful time that approaches-or we can all have our little dreams of making it so big that we have riches like Midas, and coveting those dreams we will ensure the destruction of much of what we value in life. We will commoditize ourselves, and we will find that singly we ain't worth too much. I would prefer to not spend another dime past those already committed to bailing out the financial system, I would retool our industrial base, unionize it. Train our workforce and get to work rebuilding this country-and building it right this time.
Oh, and its probably the end of the empire too, those things are expensive.
NN