The Economy
(Revised 6-7-2008)
Greed and corruption have caused terrible problems, as more and more people in America and around the world are finally realizing. And fear and panic could make things worse. But, fortunately, we can turn things around, and we can put a stop to the nonsense that has been sold to us by those who claim "It’s just good business."
I think it’s a terrible shame we’ve had to suffer so heavy an impact of the expanded version of "Reaganomics" that the Bush Regime touted and managed to foist upon America.
But I think it’s an even more terrible shame that Americans enabled Bush to enforce his economic policies, particularly after we had witnessed part of the impact of Reaganomics in the 1990s, with the exposure of some of the worst and most blatant corporate greed and corruption that it enables.
Unfortunately, too many Americans were gullible and believed Bush. They enabled him to continue and even expand Reaganomics and further serve the interests of the wealthiest few and their corporations, and the inevitable result has been increasingly detrimental to the rest of us, to say the least.
Now, I confess that, academically speaking, I don’t know much about economics. But then, a lot of people who do have an academic education in economics have not been able to keep us out of trouble. They never have, at least not for long. And that is because "expert" economists who influence partisan politicians are divided, and they disagree about what the best economic policies are. They are in conflict and disagree over partisan political ideology, which drives their opinions.
I was prompted to publish this page on the economy because I just could not get over how Republican George W. Bush, even as his reign draws to an end, had persisted in his claim that his huge tax cuts for the wealthy "are working," while in practically the same breath he admitted that the economy is in bad shape. That is an understatement, because while the preceding president’s leadership had helped to produce a booming economy and balance the budget, Bush has put the country deep in debt, weakened the dollar in the world, and is culpable in creating or exacerbating many of the financial woes that plague the majority of us and are utterly devastating to the growing working poor population.
But, if you read relevant pages on this web site, you’ll see that I’m not writing this out of partisanship to make a case for Democrats, because most of them are part of the problem. And, as long as we cling to the status quo, the economy will only get worse for the majority of people, while the wealthiest few will continue to reap greater and greater profits and live more and more luxuriously. After all, rapidly escalating and inflating prices for all the necessities of life really don’t affect them, because they have far more than enough money. After all, the wealthiest few hold and control 90 percent of the financial wealth of the nation.
For a long time I’ve been saying the U.S. political-economic system is inherently divisive and destabilizing, and it’s inherently corrupt because it’s driven by greed and self-interest. In my books I wrote a lot about that. Some of what I expressed in my books about partisan politics is highlighted on this web site, particularly on the page titled Partisan Politics, and some of what I expressed about economics is on the page titled Poverty in America. But I thought I’d show you some of the other things I’ve written about economics, that I believe are just common sense, and self-evident.
The following is quoted from chapter 3 of my second book, published in 2002:
When I was a young man in the late fifties I could buy a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread for twenty-five cents. My first car, a 1947 model which I bought used in 1957 (only ten years old), cost $149. My first apartment when I left home in 1959 to go away to college was $70 per month. Bank savings earned five percent interest. The first house I bought in 1967 (a pretty nice two bedroom house with an attached studio apartment to rent out), cost $18,000, with a mortgage with five percent interest and payments of $80 per month.
In other words, back then, one could buy a nice house for less money than what most new cars cost today. If we look further back, we would see that the rate and impact of inflation has been even worse than that. The trouble is, it has been escalating at a far more rapid rate, and just considering those figures of just a few decades ago, it seems painfully evident how our economy and its built-in inflation has gotten totally out of hand, to the point of absurdity. After all, isn’t it absurd that a house that cost $18,000 just thirty-three years ago now costs several hundred thousand dollars, and that a ten year old car once cost $149 and now costs about $10,000? Certainly that is absurd, and if you project how much things will cost in thirty more years if we allow things to keep going the way they have been, it becomes even more absurd.
Fortunately, this is not beyond our control. It has only gotten out of control because we’ve allowed our economy to be driven by greed and self-interest rather than by fairness, common sense, and common interest. It doesn’t have to just keeping getting worse. We can control our own greed, and we can definitely control the greed of the landlords, the banks, the financial institutions, the merchants, the corporations, and other rich financial power brokers. We the people can do as we choose. We can make the rules and do what we know is right. But we need to fully understand the problem first.
We need to understand that inflation is a steadily worsening problem because we’ve actually been doing what we know is wrong. After all, we have created and maintained a vicious cycle, a treacherous economic game that is played by everyone trying to get ahead, and by everyone else trying to catch up. This is only natural, perhaps (being the nature of the beast), but when you really think about it you can see it is wrong and even a little foolish. We just keep raising the numbers on prices and wages, going back and forth in turn, trying to make our incomes rise. But while there may be temporary gains, in the long run all the numbers keep going up, and nobody wins! It’s just a vicious cycle that we perpetuate, all because everyone thinks they’re going to get ahead by raising the numbers. Unfortunately, while all the numbers get bigger, actual value and worth remains virtually the same.
Well, actually, that is not entirely true. It is true generally speaking, but as we all know, the fact is that some people have made huge financial gains as a result of inflation. Some people have even made a "killing," especially in real estate, high technology, sports, and entertainment. Some people have gained enormously because of the economic practices and laws that allow inflation, while many people have suffered because of it.
A good example of that is how the minimum wage has gone up only very slightly during the last twenty years as its buying power has actually diminished, while during the same time the highest incomes of corporate executives, government officials, professional athletes, entertainers, and other highly paid individuals have soared by hundreds of thousands and even by hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Similarly, the prices and costs of certain basic commodities and goods and services have gone up only slightly in comparison to the prices and costs of some other things, and it has far less to do with the supply and demand than with greed and the abuse of power. In other words, it has not been balanced, and it has not been fair.
(Quoted from Chapter 3 of More Observations & Suggestions: The Followup to Real Prophecy Unveiled, published by iUniverse, Inc. in 2002.)
*****
The following is from the first chapter of that book:
We have some very big and very serious socio-political-economic problems that are creating terrible injustice, inequity, hardship, suffering, and death — and I would be remiss if I did not fully expose them and bring them to light. That’s my job. I have to share my view, which is that in the last two decades since 1980 we have unwittingly allowed the dark shadow of Reaganism to thoroughly creep into our lives. We have allowed the basic elements of Reaganomics to take a very firm hold, enabling the rich to get incredibly richer while the rest of us have become less well off, while the working poor and the disadvantaged poor have become much poorer. And this was happening even while the economy was booming [in the 1990s].
In the last two decades we have allowed the gap between the rich and the poor to continue growing wider and wider until it has become a huge, gaping chasm. What’s more, we have allowed right-wing conservative politicians who serve the interests of the rich to adopt ever-newer and more plentiful ways for them to use their surplus private wealth to make even more money — to invest it in ways that pretty much guarantee huge profits and financial gains.
In that respect, the political-economic climate of the 1980s and 1990s was like a balmy caressing breeze for the rich. It allowed those who have a lot of surplus wealth to profit enormously from it in a wide variety of ways, and that’s why there are now (in 2001) 298 billionaires in the U.S., when in 1982 there were only 13 billionaires. According to Forbes magazine, 47 new people entered the 400 richest club, which took a minimum of $725 million to enter. And this happened while many formerly middle class people fell into the working poor population, and the number of homeless American families reached an all-time high.
In the last two decades since Ronald Reagan rose to power, the business-friendly economic climate has allowed the income of the richest 20 percent of the population to grow by 30 percent, while the incomes of the lowest paid 20 percent of us declined by more than 20 percent. Even worse, it has diminished the buying power of the minimum wage by 20 percent, which makes it even more inadequate than it has ever been, leaving the poorest of the working poor in extremely serious financial difficulty. And again, all this happened even while the economy was still booming, because it was booming only for the rich. Moreover, in 2000 and 2001 the economic downturn has made everything worse, except for the very rich.
We, the people, allowed all that to happen.
(Quoted from Chapter 1 of More Observations & Suggestions: The Followup to Real Prophecy Unveiled, published by iUniverse, Inc. in 2002.)
*****
Please note that I point out that the problem kept getting worse even when a Democrat was in the office of U.S. President for eight years during the 1990s. Bill Clinton could not stop Reaganism or Reaganomics, and while part of the reason for that was a Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats were also culpable and shared complicity in enabling the wealthiest few and their corporations to grow more and more corrupt.
As I said on the page titled Poverty in America, there is nothing wrong with being wealthy if you deserve it. There are some people who very much deserve to be reasonably wealthy, and there is nothing wrong with that. Those who are hard working deserve to be amply rewarded for their hard work, and those who are hard working and highly talented and skilled deserve to be richly rewarded.
However, many of the wealthiest few are really not deserving of the immense wealth they've managed to amass, and no one deserves to be as absurdly and excessively wealthy as some of the wealthiest few are now. The fact is that they have benefitted from and taken advantage of a very unfair, inequitable political-economic system that serves and caters to the wealthy few, at the expense of the majority, the environment, the infrastructure, and everything else.
The trouble is, right-wing conservative Republican politicians have persistently and dishonestly claimed otherwise. Even worse, hypocritical right-wing conservatives who claim and pretend to be "Christian" leaders have persistently colluded with them, and pushed and sold the absurd idea that great excessive wealth is a reward from God, and that the poor deserve their lot because they don't work hard enough and don’t have true faith in God. And Democrats and other moderate politicians have shared complicity and culpability, because they’ve either been unable or unwilling to break from the status quo. After all, it’s very profitable for them too.
Many people have "made a killing," financially speaking, but they do not realize how literally true that is, and they do not realize what they’ve killed.
In my view, it is totally unfair and absurd to keep reducing taxes for the wealthy, who keep getting wealthier and wealthier and can certainly afford to pay their fair share in taxes. As I see it, "Reaganomics," which Bush continued and expanded, is based on the deceptive and erroneous notion that it will benefit everyone if we allow the wealthiest few to keep more and more of the excessive profits and incomes they manage to rake in at our expense. And on top of that, it gives the wealthiest few so many other benefits and advantages that it has been called "welfare for the rich." And that is even more unfair, and even more absurd.
Furthermore, in my view, the theory that prices should be determined by "supply and demand" actually means that the wealthy few people who control the supply can exploit consumers who need a product. It means they can charge whatever they want even with the flimsiest of excuses. And a "global free market economy" actually means that the wealthiest few have been enabled to gradually, step by step, take control of the world’s food supplies, water supplies, medicine supplies, energy supplies, etc. That’s what they’ve been doing, and, because of cunningly deceptive "free trade" agreements, they’ve been building huge monopolies and driving small family farms and family businesses out of business in the U.S. and in many other countries.
Why? Because they’ve been enabled by corrupt politicians from both parties in the U.S. Congress that do their bidding. And that’s what WE, the people, have enabled them to do because too many of us have been naïve and gullible.
The whole world is now in a terrible mess, financially, and it is because of GREED and CORRUPTION. And we have allowed it to happen because too many of us believed those who said if we enable the rich to get even richer, it will benefit us all. What utter nonsense, and what a horrible lie.
I tell you truly, to put it in the words of Jesus, that it is easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for an excessively rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And I tell you truly that as you do unto the poorest and the least of our brethren, so you do unto me, and to your very Self.
Need I say more?
The Economy
(Revised 6-7-2008)
Greed and corruption have caused terrible problems, as more and more people in America and around the world are finally realizing. And fear and panic could make things worse. But, fortunately, we can turn things around, and we can put a stop to the nonsense that has been sold to us by those who claim "It’s just good business."
I think it’s a terrible shame we’ve had to suffer so heavy an impact of the expanded version of "Reaganomics" that the Bush Regime touted and managed to foist upon America.
But I think it’s an even more terrible shame that Americans enabled Bush to enforce his economic policies, particularly after we had witnessed part of the impact of Reaganomics in the 1990s, with the exposure of some of the worst and most blatant corporate greed and corruption that it enables.
Unfortunately, too many Americans were gullible and believed Bush. They enabled him to continue and even expand Reaganomics and further serve the interests of the wealthiest few and their corporations, and the inevitable result has been increasingly detrimental to the rest of us, to say the least.
Now, I confess that, academically speaking, I don’t know much about economics. But then, a lot of people who do have an academic education in economics have not been able to keep us out of trouble. They never have, at least not for long. And that is because "expert" economists who influence partisan politicians are divided, and they disagree about what the best economic policies are. They are in conflict and disagree over partisan political ideology, which drives their opinions.
I was prompted to publish this page on the economy because I just could not get over how Republican George W. Bush, even as his reign draws to an end, had persisted in his claim that his huge tax cuts for the wealthy "are working," while in practically the same breath he admitted that the economy is in bad shape. That is an understatement, because while the preceding president’s leadership had helped to produce a booming economy and balance the budget, Bush has put the country deep in debt, weakened the dollar in the world, and is culpable in creating or exacerbating many of the financial woes that plague the majority of us and are utterly devastating to the growing working poor population.
But, if you read relevant pages on this web site, you’ll see that I’m not writing this out of partisanship to make a case for Democrats, because most of them are part of the problem. And, as long as we cling to the status quo, the economy will only get worse for the majority of people, while the wealthiest few will continue to reap greater and greater profits and live more and more luxuriously. After all, rapidly escalating and inflating prices for all the necessities of life really don’t affect them, because they have far more than enough money. After all, the wealthiest few hold and control 90 percent of the financial wealth of the nation.
For a long time I’ve been saying the U.S. political-economic system is inherently divisive and destabilizing, and it’s inherently corrupt because it’s driven by greed and self-interest. In my books I wrote a lot about that. Some of what I expressed in my books about partisan politics is highlighted on this web site, particularly on the page titled Partisan Politics, and some of what I expressed about economics is on the page titled Poverty in America. But I thought I’d show you some of the other things I’ve written about economics, that I believe are just common sense, and self-evident.
The following is quoted from chapter 3 of my second book, published in 2002:
When I was a young man in the late fifties I could buy a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread for twenty-five cents. My first car, a 1947 model which I bought used in 1957 (only ten years old), cost $149. My first apartment when I left home in 1959 to go away to college was $70 per month. Bank savings earned five percent interest. The first house I bought in 1967 (a pretty nice two bedroom house with an attached studio apartment to rent out), cost $18,000, with a mortgage with five percent interest and payments of $80 per month.
In other words, back then, one could buy a nice house for less money than what most new cars cost today. If we look further back, we would see that the rate and impact of inflation has been even worse than that. The trouble is, it has been escalating at a far more rapid rate, and just considering those figures of just a few decades ago, it seems painfully evident how our economy and its built-in inflation has gotten totally out of hand, to the point of absurdity. After all, isn’t it absurd that a house that cost $18,000 just thirty-three years ago now costs several hundred thousand dollars, and that a ten year old car once cost $149 and now costs about $10,000? Certainly that is absurd, and if you project how much things will cost in thirty more years if we allow things to keep going the way they have been, it becomes even more absurd.
Fortunately, this is not beyond our control. It has only gotten out of control because we’ve allowed our economy to be driven by greed and self-interest rather than by fairness, common sense, and common interest. It doesn’t have to just keeping getting worse. We can control our own greed, and we can definitely control the greed of the landlords, the banks, the financial institutions, the merchants, the corporations, and other rich financial power brokers. We the people can do as we choose. We can make the rules and do what we know is right. But we need to fully understand the problem first.
We need to understand that inflation is a steadily worsening problem because we’ve actually been doing what we know is wrong. After all, we have created and maintained a vicious cycle, a treacherous economic game that is played by everyone trying to get ahead, and by everyone else trying to catch up. This is only natural, perhaps (being the nature of the beast), but when you really think about it you can see it is wrong and even a little foolish. We just keep raising the numbers on prices and wages, going back and forth in turn, trying to make our incomes rise. But while there may be temporary gains, in the long run all the numbers keep going up, and nobody wins! It’s just a vicious cycle that we perpetuate, all because everyone thinks they’re going to get ahead by raising the numbers. Unfortunately, while all the numbers get bigger, actual value and worth remains virtually the same.
Well, actually, that is not entirely true. It is true generally speaking, but as we all know, the fact is that some people have made huge financial gains as a result of inflation. Some people have even made a "killing," especially in real estate, high technology, sports, and entertainment. Some people have gained enormously because of the economic practices and laws that allow inflation, while many people have suffered because of it.
A good example of that is how the minimum wage has gone up only very slightly during the last twenty years as its buying power has actually diminished, while during the same time the highest incomes of corporate executives, government officials, professional athletes, entertainers, and other highly paid individuals have soared by hundreds of thousands and even by hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Similarly, the prices and costs of certain basic commodities and goods and services have gone up only slightly in comparison to the prices and costs of some other things, and it has far less to do with the supply and demand than with greed and the abuse of power. In other words, it has not been balanced, and it has not been fair.
(Quoted from Chapter 3 of More Observations & Suggestions: The Followup to Real Prophecy Unveiled, published by iUniverse, Inc. in 2002.)
*****
The following is from the first chapter of that book:
We have some very big and very serious socio-political-economic problems that are creating terrible injustice, inequity, hardship, suffering, and death — and I would be remiss if I did not fully expose them and bring them to light. That’s my job. I have to share my view, which is that in the last two decades since 1980 we have unwittingly allowed the dark shadow of Reaganism to thoroughly creep into our lives. We have allowed the basic elements of Reaganomics to take a very firm hold, enabling the rich to get incredibly richer while the rest of us have become less well off, while the working poor and the disadvantaged poor have become much poorer. And this was happening even while the economy was booming [in the 1990s].
In the last two decades we have allowed the gap between the rich and the poor to continue growing wider and wider until it has become a huge, gaping chasm. What’s more, we have allowed right-wing conservative politicians who serve the interests of the rich to adopt ever-newer and more plentiful ways for them to use their surplus private wealth to make even more money — to invest it in ways that pretty much guarantee huge profits and financial gains.
In that respect, the political-economic climate of the 1980s and 1990s was like a balmy caressing breeze for the rich. It allowed those who have a lot of surplus wealth to profit enormously from it in a wide variety of ways, and that’s why there are now (in 2001) 298 billionaires in the U.S., when in 1982 there were only 13 billionaires. According to Forbes magazine, 47 new people entered the 400 richest club, which took a minimum of $725 million to enter. And this happened while many formerly middle class people fell into the working poor population, and the number of homeless American families reached an all-time high.
In the last two decades since Ronald Reagan rose to power, the business-friendly economic climate has allowed the income of the richest 20 percent of the population to grow by 30 percent, while the incomes of the lowest paid 20 percent of us declined by more than 20 percent. Even worse, it has diminished the buying power of the minimum wage by 20 percent, which makes it even more inadequate than it has ever been, leaving the poorest of the working poor in extremely serious financial difficulty. And again, all this happened even while the economy was still booming, because it was booming only for the rich. Moreover, in 2000 and 2001 the economic downturn has made everything worse, except for the very rich.
We, the people, allowed all that to happen.
(Quoted from Chapter 1 of More Observations & Suggestions: The Followup to Real Prophecy Unveiled, published by iUniverse, Inc. in 2002.)
*****
Please note that I point out that the problem kept getting worse even when a Democrat was in the office of U.S. President for eight years during the 1990s. Bill Clinton could not stop Reaganism or Reaganomics, and while part of the reason for that was a Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats were also culpable and shared complicity in enabling the wealthiest few and their corporations to grow more and more corrupt.
As I said on the page titled Poverty in America, there is nothing wrong with being wealthy if you deserve it. There are some people who very much deserve to be reasonably wealthy, and there is nothing wrong with that. Those who are hard working deserve to be amply rewarded for their hard work, and those who are hard working and highly talented and skilled deserve to be richly rewarded.
However, many of the wealthiest few are really not deserving of the immense wealth they've managed to amass, and no one deserves to be as absurdly and excessively wealthy as some of the wealthiest few are now. The fact is that they have benefitted from and taken advantage of a very unfair, inequitable political-economic system that serves and caters to the wealthy few, at the expense of the majority, the environment, the infrastructure, and everything else.
The trouble is, right-wing conservative Republican politicians have persistently and dishonestly claimed otherwise. Even worse, hypocritical right-wing conservatives who claim and pretend to be "Christian" leaders have persistently colluded with them, and pushed and sold the absurd idea that great excessive wealth is a reward from God, and that the poor deserve their lot because they don't work hard enough and don’t have true faith in God. And Democrats and other moderate politicians have shared complicity and culpability, because they’ve either been unable or unwilling to break from the status quo. After all, it’s very profitable for them too.
Many people have "made a killing," financially speaking, but they do not realize how literally true that is, and they do not realize what they’ve killed.
In my view, it is totally unfair and absurd to keep reducing taxes for the wealthy, who keep getting wealthier and wealthier and can certainly afford to pay their fair share in taxes. As I see it, "Reaganomics," which Bush continued and expanded, is based on the deceptive and erroneous notion that it will benefit everyone if we allow the wealthiest few to keep more and more of the excessive profits and incomes they manage to rake in at our expense. And on top of that, it gives the wealthiest few so many other benefits and advantages that it has been called "welfare for the rich." And that is even more unfair, and even more absurd.
Furthermore, in my view, the theory that prices should be determined by "supply and demand" actually means that the wealthy few people who control the supply can exploit consumers who need a product. It means they can charge whatever they want even with the flimsiest of excuses. And a "global free market economy" actually means that the wealthiest few have been enabled to gradually, step by step, take control of the world’s food supplies, water supplies, medicine supplies, energy supplies, etc. That’s what they’ve been doing, and, because of cunningly deceptive "free trade" agreements, they’ve been building huge monopolies and driving small family farms and family businesses out of business in the U.S. and in many other countries.
Why? Because they’ve been enabled by corrupt politicians from both parties in the U.S. Congress that do their bidding. And that’s what WE, the people, have enabled them to do because too many of us have been naïve and gullible.
The whole world is now in a terrible mess, financially, and it is because of GREED and CORRUPTION. And we have allowed it to happen because too many of us believed those who said if we enable the rich to get even richer, it will benefit us all. What utter nonsense, and what a horrible lie.
I tell you truly, to put it in the words of Jesus, that it is easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for an excessively rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And I tell you truly that as you do unto the poorest and the least of our brethren, so you do unto me, and to your very Self.
Need I say more?
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