by Bill Willers
San Francisco Bay View
July 24, 2003
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0724-07.htm(snip)
Paul Krugman, in a May 27 article in the New York Times titled “Stating the Obvious,” wrote that “the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can’t possibly afford it while keeping its other promises; ... The people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need.”
Two days later, Peronet Despeignes, reporting in the Financial Times of London, wrote, “The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totaling at least $44,200 trillion (the deficit is currently at about $6 trillion) in current US dollars.”
(snip)
Corporate America has spent billions lobbying for deregulation of its activities and for privatization of everything from the health system to education to national parks and forests to Social Security - a situation that would lead to ownership and control by the corporate sector and a tiny handful of the super rich of virtually every aspect of society.
With no cash in the federal till - due to massive tax cuts along with huge deficits, and ultimate inability of the government to borrow further - there would no longer be much to argue about. The corporate sector would win by default, so that everything needed by the masses would have to be obtained through them at any price they would want to charge.
- more . . .
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0724-07.htm