“Yawn”.
A
Research by Brookings Institution economists William Gale and Peter Orszag underscores the extent to which the design of the tax cuts has relied on budget gimmickry. They found that in the 1990s, the practice of having tax cuts appear to expire — that is, of enacting tax cuts ostensibly scheduled to expire after a few years when the intention and likely actual outcome was to have the tax cuts become a
permanent fixture of law — was employed on a modest scale. The practice exploded, however, with the 2001 tax-cut legislation.
Gale and Orszag, citing CBO data, show that at the start of 2001 the cost ten years down the road of extending all tax-cut measures in law that had a temporary status was $22 billion. By contrast, if the temporary tax-cut provisions in place today are all extended, their cost in ten years (i.e., in 2014) will be $431 billion.
The Administration has engaged in ongoing efforts to obscure the ultimate costs of its tax cuts. These efforts are reflected in the Administration’s current budget, released in February 2004. The budget shows deficit figures only over the next five years, which obscures the likely growth of the deficit in the second half of the coming decade under the Administration’s proposals, with the large deficits driven in significant part by its proposal to make the tax cuts permanent.
In addition, in its current budget, the Administration proposes new tax-advantaged savings and investment accounts that feature striking timing gimmicks. As a result, this proposal raises revenue over the first five years. But the proposal would cause increasingly large revenue losses after that. The proposal ultimately is likely to cost the equivalent of $35 billion a year
B
Washington funds much of its current imbalance by borrowing from Beijing the dollars the Chinese have earned selling consumer goods to America. Almost all of this borrowing from China is through the sale of US Treasury securities – $347 billion as of November, 2006. Americans have to worry that in some future confrontation, Beijing might threaten to sell some of these highly liquid notes, driving up US interest rates overnight.
But China’s emergence as the global factory also has implications for US trade policy. Much of China’s surplus is a product of Chinese companies importing parts from Taiwan or elsewhere that are then assembled and exported to America. This role as the global-manufacturing middleman enhances Beijing’s influence throughout Asia. Thailand or Indonesia need China now more than they once did. Beijing’s recent aggressive pursuit of preferential trade agreements throughout Southeast Asia further draws these nations into the Chinese economic orbit.
Moreover, the emergence of China as both producer and consumer has meant that China, not the US, is now the largest trading partner for a number of American allies, including Japan, South Korea and Europe. As a result, Washington has relatively less influence over these governments on a range of issues.
c
The McClatchy newspapers report that in the proposed Status of Forces Agreement being negotiated with Iraq the United States is asking for (among other things)
* 58 U.S. military bases (approximately 28 more than currently exist)
* U.S. control over Iraqi airspace up to 30,000 feet
* immunity from prosecution for American military personnel
* immunity from prosecution for U.S. private military contractors
* granting the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq
So far the Iraqi government has rejected the agreement as proposed and negotiations continue. Once an agreement is reached the Bush Administration plans to sign it as an Executive Order and does not plan to ask the U.S. Senate to ratify the agreement.
However, the U.S. Congress could challenge the President on this by making it clear that no appropriated money could be used to fund these military bases or pay for the private military contractors. Whether Congress has the backbone to do so is another matter.
If something similar to this proposed Status of Forces Agreement is finally approved, it will be disastrous for the United States. Any American presence in Iraq, particularly a significant long-term military presence, will only serve to generate increased anger and tension in the Middle East. Even if a political breakthrough is achieved by the Iraqi government, and there is no indication to think that such a breakthrough will happen, sectarian violence will continue for many years to come in Iraq. Americans will continue to be targets of the many extremists that remain active there. There simply is no way that we can remain in Iraq for the next five or ten years without continuing to incur significant casualties. The American people do not want continued casualties. They have had enough.
John McCain, like his Bush/Cheney forebears, likes to paint a rosy picture of how thing will be in Iraq in the coming years. He assumes that in a year or two the political situation will improve so much that there will no longer be significant U.S. casualties. But just as Bush and Cheney were wrong (“we’ll be treated as liberators”, “mission accomplished”, etc.) so too will John McCain be wrong. And our brave American military will have to pay the price for John McCain’s imperialistic adventure.
Few Americans learned in school that slaves were about half the workforce that built the White House and the U.S. Capitol. A slave named Philip Reid supervised construction of the Statue of Freedom hoisted atop the Capitol dome in 1863. Such revelations rightly disturb our view of important symbols of democracy and remind us that slavery is at the foundation of our nation’s history.
Well-known bastions of American capital also have the institution of slavery at their foundation.
Railroads utilized slave labor to lay rail. Tobacco firms used slaves in the harvest. Southern utilities used slaves to construct oil lines. Mining companies used slaves to process salt and coal.
The unpaid productivity of these slaves was converted into corporate income and wealth that still sustains many companies today. Slaves were denied not only wages but the opportunity to buy property, build companies and pass assets on to future generations.
Many people know the expression “40 acres and a mule,” but don’t know it was a false promise. In 1865, General Sherman issued an order providing homesteads to freed slaves. But President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, overrode the order and gave the land back to white Confederate landowners. Instead of 40 acres and a mule, freed slaves got brutal sharecropping and segregation.
The descendants of slaves continue to find their ability to jump on board the asset-building train impaired. Fault lines laid long ago forged a vast and enduring wealth gap between white Americans and African-Americans. In 1998, the median net worth of white households was $81,700, while the median net worth of African-American households was just $10,000. The homeownership rate among white families is 74 percent, while for African-American families it is just 48 percent nationally, and much lower in some local areas.
If the foundation of the Capitol was dug and laid by slaves, and some of America’s most successful corporations have profits from slavery in their early capital formation, perhaps the story we tell ourselves about the creation of all wealth needs to be examined and those invisible foundation stones be brought into the light.
Slaves weren’t poor because people of African heritage are lazy. They were poor because the laws of the land prohibited them from getting paid for their work and from owning assets.
In generations since, structural obstacles have continued to impede black asset development. African-American homeowners are often subjected to discriminatory and predatory lending practices that unfairly inflate their mortgage costs and rob them of the home equity that so many Americans draw on for college, business start-ups and retirement. Insurance companies are only now coming to acknowledge that for many years they charged African-American customers unjustifiably higher rates than whites. After World War II, the GI bill and Veterans Administration helped almost exclusively white families to become homeowners.
When black farmers filed their historic lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture (DOA) in 1997, DOA investigators presented damning evidence of decades of discrimination: 84 percent of the white applicants had their loan applications approved, while only 56 percent of the black applicants received loans. The result was that black farmers lost their farms at more than triple the rate of white farmers.
I am only stating the Truth
