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The first question of the morning on C-Span's Washington Journal program asks what we think about revelations from Alan Greenspan's latest book. Quotes from it were read and comments from several newspapers were quoted as well.
From the book we were told that back in 2000 the Fed cut rates to counter what they saw as a deflationary trend. You may recall that the deflation they were fighting was actually just a minor dip in the DOW, but the article went on to quote Greenspan telling us that it was a wise decision made in the right way, they knew they were creating a problem for the future with the borrowing their rate cuts would create but they would take care of that when the time came. They knew full well a "bubble" would develop somewhere but They'ed swat the fly when it landed. Well, the time came and went and we saw how they took care of the problem.
Back when I was a child in college the party line was that deficits really didn't hurt us because, after all, the money we owed was owed to ourselves. Someone might want to ask the Chinese about who we actually owe the money to. The borrowing continues.
There has never been a day during the Bush Administration's rule that the poor and middle class were not put in line to pay and the rich set up to receive. As wages and salaries have either declined or at best held flat the income of the rich has grown by leaps and bounds. That happens when you cut rates for the rich and leave them untouched for everyone else.
So, where are we now? The answer is simple as pie. Massive funds have been borrowed. Borrowed funds have been spent by the Government at an unprecedented rate with much of the money gone to the military/industrial complex. Income statistics will show you that the workers in the complex have not benefited from the spending but that the owners of the companies involved have done extremely well, the tax structure has been altered in such a way as to shift the repayment of the borrowed money away from those who profited from its expenditure and onto the backs of the working people who not only did not see any additional benefit from the greatly increased spending but also were charged with sending their sons and daughters, and husbands and wives into the slaughterhouse that is Iraq.
And so in short, they purposefully went into a borrowing frenzy to prop up the stock market. In doing so they created the housing market bubble, the rich profited greatly as more and more money was borrowed and handed over to them. The tax structure was altered to shift the repayment of the borrowed money from the rich to the middle class and poor and their children and grandchildren.
This is the Republican Party at its best.
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