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Giuliano media => Essays => Topic started by: Giuliano Taverna on May 28, 2009, 02:51:57 pm


Title: A non partisan understanding of the financial collapse
Post by: Giuliano Taverna on May 28, 2009, 02:51:57 pm
Responsibility for the economic collapse isn't an issue of political parties. Its an issues of the entire country being fiscally irresponsible.

The belief in credit as money is the reason why we are all in debt. The only way to get out of this is to stop taking out lines of credit, pay down our debts, and cut down on inflation. In the short term it will cause a recession. In the long term it will lead to sustainable growth that won't end with a deflationary bubble burst.

The policies that lead to this disaster were two fold. One the belief in universal deregulation being good. The truth is removing unfunded mandates on business do improve the economy, but removing anti trust laws will always lead to overly large corporations that will then become "too big to fail" hence leading to this bail out issue.

The other is the idea that there should be unfunded mandates levied against business. Its perfectly fine to expect a minimum wage, healthcare coverage, or whatever else. But they need to be funded either with tax breaks, or with tax credits.

Deregulation is a republican policy.
Unfunded mandates are democrat policy.
Both contributed to this mess.

And all Americans are responsible for not holding our elected officials accountable for these decisions. We allowed all of this to happen, and today we continue to allow the same mistakes to be made on an even larger scale.

Its illogical and foolish to claim that because someone supported policy A that they have no right to criticize policy B. Or to be more blunt, Bush left Obama a deficit isn't an argument against the deficit obama is creating. And its hypocritical of democrats to refute republicans when republicans criticize democrats for doing the same things that democrats had before criticized republicans for. Democrats claimed dissension is patriotic, now they take the position that dissention is un-American. Which is it?

I would argue that fiscal responsibility is a bi partisan issue and that its unpatriotic and un-American to leave a massive debt for future generations to pay for. And that what we are doing isn't a sure investment but a high risk gamble.

I believe we should dramatically reform a lot of the functions of our government so that costs do not exceed revenue so that we can eliminate the deficit and create a surplus that we can use to pay off the debt. Our economy without debt or deficits would improve dramatically simply because it would restore immense confidence. It would also allow us to give real money to people so that they can pay down their debts. Instead of a massive drive to spend. We should have a massive drive to get out of debt.

If all our debts are paid, our economy will be free to grow and expand. That is real change. An alternative to the conventional wisdom of the economic collapse