raise the deficit ceiling

Dear Friends,

Future investigators, trundling through all the mess we have left behind will wonder why we weren’t out there demanding accountability and a change away from all which ails us.

Last week i wrote that we are not as set in our ways as we think, we can change and we can come out of the fog of propaganda.

After the last Great Depression the country woke up and started to invest in itself. Those who had been voted in (even though wealthy in their own right) realized that the wealth concentrated in the top two percent was not good for the country as a whole. Taxes went up, public works were implemented to put people back to work and the economy started to stabilize as more citizens could afford to spend.

Today we have a group in Congress that won’t raise revenue to pay off debts that they created by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and engaging in two wars they kept off the books. Their idea is to shrink government while putting more and more people out of jobs. How this can be viewed as beneficial to the economy when it is contracting is beyond me.

Propaganda is all about successful liars revealing considerable truth in what they say, but also sufficient untruths to cause the listener confusion about what the reality really is. Today too many believe that the deficit is our main problem. Its not, jobs are our real problem and neither party has come up with any ideas concerning a solution.

The Independent has a piece up in their science section that declares wide faced men more prone to lie. Professor Haselhuhn said.

"Importantly, we found evidence that the link between men's facial ratio and their unethical behavior is caused by a sense of power. Men with larger facial ratios feel more powerful, and this sense of power then leads them to act unethically. Our findings suggest that some men are simply predisposed to act unethically in order to achieve their goals.”

Well duh and i don’t think it has one bit to do with how wide a man’s face is. They had a picture up of Nixon as an example of a wide faced man and suggested that you should examine the width of any salesman’s face before you buy something from him because he could be lying.

Men and women lie to achieve power over others, those who believe the lie to be true become accomplices in manipulations that may be detrimental to their lives. Today many in this country are blindsided by the BIG LIE, the worst kind of lie which tricks the victim into believing something about the country and its government that can be contradicted by information they have access to but refuse to embrace.

The big lie today is if we default all we have to do is pay the interest on the loans. Wrong, no one in government signed on to interest only loans, the contracts are for interest and principal and if you were holding the loans you would not like a reduction in your payments. Reducing the payment is defaulting and defaulting could have negative repercussions all over the world, including your savings and investments. Supporting this crazy scheme puts us all at risk.

i read an example last week on line that used credit cards to explain the deficit. Say your card should max out at $5,000 dollars but you spent over your limit and now you owe $7,000. How much should you pay back $5,000 or $7,000? If you answered $7,000 you are correct. You owe all the money even though it is above your limit. You and no one else is obligated to pay it back. Our deficit has gone over the limit Congress set. Do you think we should or should not pay it off? If you think we are obligated to pay our debts then you are in favor of raising the debt ceiling. This does not mean more borrowing it means we can now pay off what we have already spent.

We all want reductions in government spending but not on the backs of the middle class and poor who are already stressed enough. The Republicans are holding the government (which is all of us) hostage by tying raising the debt ceiling to reducing money that goes to fund the social safety net. There are other more humane ways to do this that won’t eliminate jobs, won’t send the poor and elderly into the streets and will improve our economy.

We can cut the defense budget, end all three wars, and still be spending more on our military than any other nation in the world combined.