Tuesday, October 18, 2005

New Orleans, Mexico, and the Mexification of America

Contrary to popular belief, tax cuts do not create economic growth. While theory says they do, theory is bullshit. What counts is reality, and we have the reality of almost a hundred years of accurate statistics showing that periods of high taxes in America are periods of high economic growth.

Of course, what counts as "high taxes" in America would be low taxes in Europe, so undoubtedly that has something to do with it -- if you have low taxes, and even lower taxes, neither is likely to affect economic growth as much as the infrastructure that taxes pay for (honest government, highways, regulation of necessary utilities, etc.). So if you are improving the infrastructure (by bring in honest government, building highways, building sewer plants, upgrading water lines, improving the schools, etc.), you will produce more growth than that created by cutting taxes, since people will now be able to move about more easily, be better-educated due to the better schools, be in better health due to cleaner water and adequate sewage treatment, etc. So why the constant unfounded assertions that "low taxes cause economic growth", at the same time that our national infrastructure is crumbling?

Tannish the Wolf, in my previous posting, asserts that our ruling elite wishes to turn the United States into Brazil or Columbia, where the super-rich live in communities guarded by armed soldiers while the poor are left to live or die on their own, and where there is no middle class to interfere with the ability of the super-rich to obtain as many servants as necessary to live in the style to which they are accustomed. I hold that our ruling elite has a different role-model, however: Mexico.

Whenever I hear people complain about taxes, I tell them "So move to Mexico, then, their taxes are half of what ours are." They sputter and then whine that Mexico is a cesspool of corruption and filth. Doh. Yeah, that's what happens when you don't spend enough on the infrastructure of clean government and public sanitation. But then these right-wing tools try to say that it's because of moral failings on the part of the Mexican people that Mexico is a cesspool of corruption and filth. Their pointy white hats, apparently, are constricting the flow of blood to their brains, because they fail to see just how racist and bigotted such an assertion really is.

Reality, of course, is that Mexico is the way it is because Mexico's ruling elite wants it that way. This allows Mexico's ruling elite to live in luxury with plenty of servants, while the remainder of Mexico festers in poverty and filth. And Mexico, not Brazil or Columbia, is the model that our own ruling elite is using, because Mexico is what they are most familiar with. It is a rite of passage, amongst the children of our ruling elite, to go on week-long binges in Mexico where they drink under-aged, imbibe drugs illegal here in the U.S. to the point of being higher than Keith Richards, and mistreat the poorly-paid waiters, drivers, and servants who have no choice but to endure the treatment or else starve to death, waiters drivers and servants who leave their jobs at the end of the day and go home to tin-shack hovels with no running water or electricity. The future of the United States, to these now-grown-up children of our ruling elite, looks a lot like Acapulco -- a fabulous resort for the rich and worthy, grinding poverty for the servant class which keeps it running.

Consider, for a minute, illegal Mexican immigration. Pat Buchanon and the "Minutemen" are right -- sort of. This really IS part of a plan to make the United States into Mexico North. But it is not a plan by the Mexicans themselves. They just want food and shelter and jobs, they have no plan other than survival. Rather, it is part of a plan by our ruling elite to destroy our own working and middle class and thus create a plentiful supply of servants like they feel is their due. Consider the fact that, on any construction site in the Southwest, the only non-Mexican faces you're likely to see are the foremen (easily recognizable because they have the white hats with the brims that go all around, while the workers have dark skin and have the white hats with the brim that is only on the front). Once upon a time, construction jobs were the way that the working poor used to work themselves out of poverty. But with the illegal Mexicans driving down wages by being willing to work for $50 per day as "day laborers", they can no longer do that.

So who benefits from this? Why, it is the ruling elite, the rich white men (and a few women) who control the majority of wealth in America. Why else do you think their government (government of the people, by the elite, for the elite) insures that the Mexicans stay illegal, but that the contractor's sites are never raided by immigration officials? Why else do you think that "our" government has no system for verifying work credentials in real time, thus allowing illegal immigrants to present false work documents and be employed immediately? Why are the "illegals" kept illegal, so that they cannot complain of poor working conditions without being deported? This is all part of the plan to drive down wages, destroy our working class and keep them permenantly in a position of servitude to their "betters".

If you want to see the future of the United States, look to Mexico. And if you want to see that future becoming reality, watch New Orleans and South Louisiana closely... do not allow yourself to be distracted by Anna Nicole Smith's latest boob job or Michael Jackson's latest boy toy charges or whatever. Keep your eye on the ball. Because if you watch closely enough, you will see the Mexification of America in action right before your very eyes...

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

6 comments:

  1. BTW, I was the one who made the Brazil and Colombia comparison, and I'm not Tannish the Wolf. I'm a completely different wolf.uh

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  2. Oops. I have too many wolfs visiting (heh!).

    Too bad I don't have any lady penguins visiting. Sigh!

    - Badtux the Single Penguin

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  3. The theory that "proves" that tax cuts grow the economy is meant to apply to a strictly barter system, not a system with fiat currency as the backbone of the economy.

    In other words the theory states that the introduction of and addition sheep to the person with the largest flock of sheep would give that person incentive to trade that sheep to another person. The thing with money is, it doesn't cost you a damn thing to hold on to it. Unlike a sheep, which for some odd reason keeps eating and drinking, which may overtax the grazing land the flock owner has or even cost him something of value to get feed for the winter months. In other words the person who owns all the sheep has incentives to trade some of his sheep. A dollar does not have the same incentives for the owner to move it. And the incentive to use that dollar for a transaction decreases as wealth increase. In other words someone with more money is less likely to spend an extra dollar then someone with less money.

    The best way to grow the economy is to keep a dollar in circulation within the economy for the longest period of time. That is to say try to ensure that the dollar is involved in the greatest possible number of transactions. This way everyone in the supply chain increases their wealth which, oddly enough, leads to real economic growth.

    As for the main point of your post, the ruling class are not interested in turning the US into a carbon copy of Mexico simply because they know that it is in their best interest to keep the majority of America in its current semi-torpid state.

    Their end goal is of course very similar to the Mexican but everyone will be able to buy a TV. They are like the cushion a comfy middle class gives them, so they will maintain it, entertain it, distract it, and slowly deprive it. And of course continually lower the expectations the middle class has of society, but they will not outright kill it.

    Of course their natural arrogance and complete lack of brains (I personally blame the inbreeding) is working against them. More and more people are noticing, but it is not nearly enough, and by the time enough people notice it may be to late.

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  4. They may think they're getting Acapulco, but it's looking more like North Korea is what 'ol Bushco is giving us.

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  5. One fact in your charts about taxes that you fail to point out is that the great depression had a catalyst. This catalyst was a massive wave of older workers that then retired. I agree that taxes should be raised... but for different reasons. There has never been a war fought, that I know of where the said country actually lowered taxes. It has been tried to not raise them...

    Rome, under Cassius, the empire fell.

    France, under Louie The XIV, the government collapsed and good ol Louie lost his head.

    America, under Truman, massive inflation and 15%+ interest rates... but our government did not collapse.

    In this case we have made a new president, who knows what will happen. (By the by, we will once again face a huge number of retires.) Can anyone say depression... :(

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  6. Uhm, "Anonymous", I don't know where you got your info about the Great Depression. But it certainly wasn't caused by retirees. There was no such thing as "retirement" in that era -- you worked until you were no longer capable of doing so, and then you died sometime afterwards.

    The proximate cause of the Great Depression was a liquidity crisis caused by the collapse of the stock market followed by the collapse of many banks during "bank runs". Deflation was the principle result, leading to many people unable to pay their debts due to declining wages, causing the collapse of *more* banks, causing further deflation, etc. By the end of the deflationary spiral, 50% of Americans were unemployed, and 80% of Americans paid no taxes because they were so poor that they were effectively off the tax rolls. "Tax and spend" economics re-inflated the economy, and took the capital that the wealthy had accumulated as banks foreclosed on properties or collapsed (somebody bought those assets, after all, typically for pennies on the dollar) and put it back into circulation in the economy rather than sitting fallow.

    Truman had a rather different problem to deal with: consumer goods production had basically ceased during WWII (the average standard of living during WWII was worse than in the Great Depression), and people were cashing in the War Bonds that Roosevelt had sold during the war to suck up the money that was being printed to fund the war. So there was all this new money entering the economy, and nothing to buy with it. This created the opposite situation to that which faced Roosevelt in 1934 -- in 1946, massive inflation, not deflation, was the problem. But the results of this era show that handling inflation by balancing the budget and keeping taxes high in order to suck up the excess cash in the economy can result in massive economic growth too.

    All in all, the case that there is any relationship between taxes and economic growth simply has not been made. If low taxes caused economic growth, then the economy should not have grown during Truman's presidency, and Mexico should be Paradise on Earth. But neither is true -- the economy during Truman's presidency expanded enormously, and Mexico is still a fetid sewer of corruption and poverty.

    - Badtux the Economist Penguin

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