The economy is not a zero-sum game

Reminder to morons: There are two ways to handle not making enough money to meet all your basic needs. The first one is to starve shivering in the cold. The second one is to increase your income.

For some reason, the second one absolutely gets ignored by the right wing deficit cutter talking points spewers. It's as if they believe if you're not making enough money to get by, well, you should just cut out food for two days a week, or something like that. They say, “government should be like a household — should cut its expenses to match its income.” But when my dad was only making enough money to feed his children for five days a week, he didn’t starve his children for two days a week — he went out and found a second job to increase his income. But the deficit cutters want to starve the children for two days a week rather than do what’s necessary to increase income.

So could we increase the national income? Sure. The first thing would be to increase the GDP as a whole via policies aimed at increasing employment and economic growth. The second would be *targetted* tax increases where it won’t hurt consumption (basically the government equivalent of asking your boss for overtime when your kids are hungry), policies to increase percentage of our national income that is taxed (right now we’re the least-taxed major economy on the planet, and it shows in the poor state of our infrastructure and social services). You combine these two things, and the deficit goes away by increasing our income rather than starving our children.

Of course, since the majority of these fat cats who are whining about taxes and whining for less government have never had to make that choice — let your children go hungry, or find more income — they simply dismiss it as a possibility. It’s as if they operate in a zero sum world, where if your children are hungry, the only thing permissible to do is allow them to slowly starve to death, because it’s impossible to grow your income. That’s both ridiculous, and sad, that these people are so out of touch with reality that they seriously advocate letting children go hungry — which is what their policies boil down to, in the end. They'd rather see children starve due to our collapsing social services network than pay even the amount of taxes that the Japanese and Koreans pay -- yeppers, the Japs and Koreans pay more taxes than Americans do. So much for that bullshit of "Americans are too heavily taxed", just another right-wing lie like every other right-wing lie. Evil motherfuckers couldn't tell the truth if you wired'em to one of those Abu Ghraib electrocution machines and shocked their nuts every time they lied, it seems built in to them like gills on a catfish, sigh...

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin