Voters in Greece, France and even
in local elections in Germany rejected enforced austerity in recent polls. French
voters narrowly elected the Socialist Francois Hollande on a platform demanding
renegotiation of austerity measures demanded by the European Union. Taxes are
already high in France so he’ll have his work cut out for him raising taxes
enough to make a difference. At least if he can put people to work the country
won’t dive deeper into debt and deficit.
In Greece the two main
pro-austerity parties, who between themselves have governed the country for the
last 40 years, together received less than 32% of the vote. The anti’s however,
divided between the far left and right, will probably not be able to agree amongst
each other to form a government so new elections are likely soon. But that
means they won’t be eligible for additional bailout money and will likely
default, though since they’ve already forced creditors to take substantial
haircuts, to all intents and purposes they’re already in default. It’s no more
than a pretense to think otherwise.
If they knuckle under and accept
IMF and ECB austerity - the leftist candidate called those international bodies
loan sharks - there’ll be 5 to 10 years of economic pain. If they default,
they’re basically facing the same 5 to 10 years of wrenching changes and
economic dislocations, but at least their pain won’t be for the benefit of the
banksters and 1%.
The one percent’s mania for
austerity for everybody but themselves is diving economies ever deeper into
recession. If people aren’t working they aren’t paying taxes but are requiring
government help for survival. Cutting is the wrong thing to do when a country
is in recession, however, if a country runs big deficits in good times there’s
no leeway for additional spending during downturns. As mentioned previously,
the half of Keynesianism that governments have conveniently overlooked is the
need to build surpluses during boom times. It’s too easy to prop up economies
and make everything look good by spending money you don’t have. It’s too easy
to think you can rely on growth or inflation or something to come along in the
future to make the debt easy to manage, because as we are seeing it doesn’t
always work that way.
In any case, almost everybody is missing the
point. Last year greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than ever before. Just
imagine what would’ve happened if many parts of the world were not in recession and there was no effort whatever to curb emissions.
Those record emissions might’ve been doubled. So while my heart goes out to
those developed world people in America and Europe who are jobless and
suffering, I have to say to those same people, Thank you for being poor and not
being able to consume.
What’s needed is a new paradigm
where slackers are tolerated if not appreciated and those who live simply by
choice are honored; where growth is reserved strictly for non-material plane
efforts: knowledge, intellect, beauty and spirituality. The tiny Himalayan
kingdom of Bhutan is promoting a Gross Happiness Index in place of Gross
National Product which includes everything that is bad for us as well as good…
every time an auto accident causes personal or property damage, it gets added
to GNP. You want to help the economy? Get cancer.
We have to retrench. If somebody
really doesn’t want to work (and so much of what’s classified as work today is so
demeaning and undesirable, who can blame them) why not give them the minimum
for survival and thank them for not consuming. Nixon had the right idea with
his guaranteed annual income, which, if I remember correctly was pegged at $4000
per year. With a little casual work on the side, that’d be enough (in today’s
dollars) to live a simple but decent life. We also need to take France’s lead
and shorten the work week along with encouraging deflation to make life
cheaper. It’s already happened in the housing market. It’s now much more
possible for an average person with a job to afford a home.
Shortening the work week has the
added great advantage of tremendously reducing rush hour traffic. Some people
would work shorter hours five days a week, others would work a day less. Either
way, all transportation systems would have much lighter burdens. Now most
people are forced by the eight hour day to come and go at the same time.
Shortening the work week would also give people the time to get involved in
society and community, not to mention family, self -improvement and pleasure.
The way to deflate the economy is
to tax the rich, really tax them, tax the shit out of them. Nothing good comes
from the wealthy having too much money. If they have less money to throw
around, prices would be forced down. This is especially true in places like New
York which are magnets for vast wealth. If people can no longer afford sky high
prices for purchasing or renting housing, then their prices will go down, and
all real estate prices will follow, benefiting everybody (but the landed wealthy)
in the long run.
The current system is top heavy.
BBC interviewed a bankster asshole a while back who kept repeating how
important the financial community was to the UK and predicting doom and disaster
if a small stock transaction tax were imposed. He conveniently ignored the
hundreds of billions of dollars the banksters cost the people in bailouts. A
majority of people in a UK survey working for the banks said they were there
strictly for the money and that they didn’t think they deserved to earn as much
as they did. With so many people in finance earning upwards of half million a
year, they’ve turned once middle class London neighborhoods into enclaves where
only the upper classes can afford to live and by extension have raised the cost
of housing for everybody in the city.
The other major change that needs
to happen to save the world is to tax advertising, exempting only small
businesses. I’m convinced that marketing is the root of all evil, not money.
Money, after all, can do good things, while the sole purpose of marketing is to
convince people to buy things they might not need or are possibly bad for them.
Even if what they are encouraged to purchase through adverts isn’t necessarily
bad, the act of consuming is going to consume our planet and people need to be
encouraged to hold back, to not indulge, to buy only what they really need. The
present path is not sustainable, let alone healthy.
Admittedly I’m way out of synch
with prevailing philosophy (it’s not the first time). The idea of applauding
slackers and promoting deflation and reduction in place of growth is about as
likely in the present political climate as encouraging pedophilia and welcoming
pollution-caused cancers, nonetheless that’s where the world needs to go. That
it can’t possibly go that way is a sad commentary on the state of our only
planet and its inevitable downward slide into catastrophe.
