Comments at Baseline Scenario:
Morgan Stanley yesterday said what we have all known for some time. There will be government defaults of various types on debts which have become unmanageable.
In a story from the UK Telegraph yesterday, a report claims the Tories are placing the greatest pain in managing their budget gaps on the backs of the less well to do, presumably protecting their more well to do constituency. No surprise to anyone if it is true. And yet this may not be enough unless the economy recovers and the great mass of the public can regain some reasonable level of organic economic activity.
In the States, the uber wealthy will be spending large sums to lobby against new taxes, and even removing tax cuts that were known to be untenable, and based on false economic assumptions, at the time they were passed under Bush. Instead they will point to more broadly public and regressive taxes such as VATs, and seek to curtail public programs like Medicare and Social Security, while leaving their own subsidies and welfare, such as those in the financial sector and corporate and dividend tax breaks, sacrosanct.
In the US the broad mass of consumers have been the economy’s golden goose….
More:
“Excessive consumer debt is an outcome of prolonged inequality – in trying to remain middle class, too many people borrowed too much, while unscrupulous lenders were only too willing to take advantage of such people.”
“But there is a striking similarity between the longstanding stated intention to “starve the beast” (meaning press for reduction in government by creating binding constraints, like a perceived crisis) and what we are seeing play out today.”
Prolonged inequality. Creating binding constraints. Perceived crisis. Yes. That’s the whole thing, for decades.
And to sum it up:
This is made needlessly complex, and that obscures the truth.
We are under assault by organized crime, nothing more and nothing less.
Neoliberalism is the ideology of legalized gangsterism, corporate welfare is robbery, the bailout was stepped up robbery, and now the calls for austerity are simply another robbery gambit.
All of this is crime, period. The finance and government elites are criminals, period. We should never let ourselves be distracted from the criminological view of this.
Would you stand and listen to someone literally breaking into your house explain abstruse ideological angles on the event? We the people shouldn’t do that with these equally brazen but infinitely worse robbers.