|
You're saying basically, if I get you, that BushCo used us as collateral, and now has to make us look prettier for our mortgage holders?
The problem, as I see it anyway, is that the financial economic model has no standard to base our wealth on. Money is labor, converted into tradeble format, and even though capitalists, who basically bundle and trade labor to create wealth, can inflate the value of that labor, of that money, through speculation and gambling and all the financial games they play, ultimately it is still tied to labor. Speculation simply inflates the value of the money until the value of labor catches up to it.
Ultimately, though, if labor goes down, then the value of the extra money generated must collapse back to real levels. That's where depressions and recessions come from, in my opinion--money is readjusting. That readjustment, though, isn't a perfect correction. Sometimes it can be slowed, allowing labor to increase in value enough that the fall is lessened--I'm picturing Wile E Coyote Economics churning his feet over a chasm but still moving forward enough to reach a ledge on the far side. That's what FDR's policies did--they created a net to keep the value from falling as quickly, and often to keep it from rising as recklessly.
But the protections of FDR have been dismantled. Money can fall not only to the value of labor, but it can hit labor so hard that it knocks it off its perch and into far greater depths than we expect. In that case, it isn't a correction--a recession--but a collapse--a depression.
If I get you right, you're saying that the money we borrowed for the war was based on the expectation that labor--money--would go up, as Reagan's economic beliefs and the Laffer Curve pretend it will, or really, that BushCo borrowed the money not even understanding the basics of money and the economy, believing that the value of the money would go up through stock market investments and mortgage and credit speculation, until what we owed was less than what we borrowed. Add to that the money he expected from the oil fields--both the money the government could steal directly, and the boost in our economy from what he thought would be lower gas prices.
But instead of going up, labor--money--was crushed under the burden of all the credit, and soon a reckoning will have to come. The plans now, whether they understand it or not, are an attempt to float money--to keep the coyote's legs churning--as long as possible, in the hope that the crash will be lessened, or even avoided. But BushCo doesn't understand money--they don't get that it's tied to labor. They have a simplistic, business-centric view that sees capital as something disconnected to labor, as something created by, rather than used by, Capitalists.
So they can't understand the basic underlying problem. They can only see the symptoms, like the credit crunch and the falling dollar, and think that fixing the symptom fixes the problem.
We need Dr. House to find the cause beneath the symptoms. Here's hoping Obama can be that doctor.
That's what your post made me think about, anyway. If I wandered from what you meant, apologies.
|