Author Archives: PEB

We have a huge debt and deficit primarily due to ten years of war while cutting taxes; economics of war 101 is you can’t fight a war without paying for it; you either raise taxes amongst your own people or plunder the enemy – since we don’t plunder the enemy we needed to raise taxes, but we did neither. $2 billion dollars spent per week each in Iraq and Afghanistan x 572 weeks = $2,288,000,000,000 of pure debt with no offset whatsoever; coupled to that an infrastructure badly in need of repair, plus an economy devastated by eight years of mismanagement by the previous administration and you have our economic woes of today.

Conservatives need to give up the failed idea of voodoo economics – trickle down has never worked, it’s a nice rosy economic theory that doesn’t produce what it claims will happen; we’ve had tax breaks for the top 1% (the so-called job creators) for more than a decade, where’s the jobs and where’s the revenue?

There’s going to need to be tax increases – sorry, but that’s going to happen; if it’s going to happen it needs to start with those who can afford them most, and it may then be necessary to raise everyone’s taxes.

After that we’re going to have to cut spending, and the first place to do that is the military; we now spend more on defense then the rest of the world combined, we don’t need a huge active military force, we need sufficient to defend the country. After we’ve trimmed back the military industrial complex we can start on other programs including social programs.

Problem with today’s conservatives is they want to do it all backwards; let’s cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% even more while increasing taxes on the lower classes; next lets increase defense spending while cutting social programs.