The Troubling USian Economic Modus Operandi

 

 

 

By Richard John Stapleton

The USian govt yearly budget deficit is now about $1.8 trillion creating a need to find cash money of that amount in excess of yearly tax revenues of the government. This money is raised by selling treasury bills and notes to individuals, pension funds, and other countries, and, if all else fails, telling the USian Federal Reserve System golden egg-laying goose money machine to create more funny money from thin air, by simply punching digits into Federal Reserve System computers and calling the resulting numbers money, to buy USian govt treasury bills and notes.

This process inexorably results in more and more debt being accumulated through time. The current USian federal debt of $33 trillion now exceeds the USian yearly GDP, gross domestic product, about $25.5 trillion.   

For how much longer can this process proceed before it collapses? Japan has been using a similar process longer than the US suggesting the USian process can last a while yet, perhaps a decade or more. Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is now about 250 percent; but the process, a natural recurrence in a system such as Japan’s and the USian republic-capitalist system, has, throughout Earthian economic history, always eventually collapsed. In the past Earthian humans in such situations have always been able to rise from their ashes after such collapses, after much suffering, and eventually go on to new higher levels of productivity, if not economic satisfaction and justice. The risk this time around however is the possibility that there will be no more rising from the ashes, thanks to GWCC and MNWP, global warming and climate change and militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation.

This boom-and-bust capitalistic process is fundamentally caused by the Earthian human population rising faster than the capacity of Earthian economic systems to produce the necessities of life for all Earthian humans (food, clothing, and shelter), causing chronic unsatisfied wants and needs of individuals and groups. In the USian capitalistic economic system this boom-and-bust process has been accentuated and enhanced by the USian republic form of representational government. Rather than choose direct democracy the founders of the USian government chose to make the US a republic rather than a democracy. Ordinary citizens would be represented in halls of government by individuals they democratically voted for, but they themselves would not be able to discuss and choose how the country would be run.

Needy and greedy individuals and groups having no say-so in how to create a fair and effective economic system for getting their legitimate needs met had to vote for “representatives” to argue their cases in halls of government. This led to corruption caused by a competitive struggle that naturally erupted among voters to get their “representatives” to advocate and vote for things in halls of government that would help them get their wants and needs met, rather than the wants and needs of others.

This led to bribing representatives in the form of campaign contributions, which led to the creation of a class of politicians that did nothing but politic, who made their livings politicking, who often enriched themselves one way or the other by extracting money from their constituents in quid pro quo side deals, made possible by the power their positions gave them.

The contributions of individuals were corrupting enough, but the contributions of large corporations, defined as people with free speech with the right to contribute unlimited amounts of money to politicians to express their speech, by a republican supreme court, increased the corruption by many magnitudes. Whose needs and greed would be satisfied? It was up to the highest bidder. Meanwhile the price tags of programs and acts required to satisfy the needs, wants, and greed of constituents kept getting larger and larger, leading to the perilous predicament now facing Earthain humans in the US and elsewhere, anywhere around Spaceship Earth where you find republic governments conjoined with capitalistic economic systems.

One of the biggest cash cows of the USian republic-capitalistic political-economic process in Washington for politicians turned out to be taking campaign contributions for lowering the taxes of large corporations and the elite rich and to increase the funding of the USian military-industrial complex, causing most of the USian yearly budget deficits, and the now-existing pile of USian treasury debt, that hangs over the heads of USians like a cloud of doom.