The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
The alleged economic recovery we are currently experiencing must be a creature slow to spook and scatter. For many who watch and wait, it is a bear not yet come over the mountain.
Conventional wisdom, (the conservative kind), has long held that taxation inhibits rather than fuels economic growth. This precept remains the pre-eminent idol worshipped in the myth-based house of greed.
In fact, however, taxation is but one stage in the cycle of the capitalistic economic engine, the others being government spending, private production and all manner of consumerism.
The question lingers as to which stage in the economic cycle is primary, taxation and government spending or private production and consumerism? This issue harkens back to an ancient riddle often revisited. It can now be divulged and attested to, at this time, once and for all, that the chicken did indeed come first. (As many have long suspected … so, don’t act surprised.) Why else do you think the egg is so resentful and angry all the time? It is a quiet, brooding kind of anger, too. The kind most perilous to hatch.
Obviously, in the past few years, our economic system has been heavily damaged if not broken. Greeds of the highest order in the highest places have done us in. We all know the particulars and need not retread the old ground. Suffice it to say that now we need somehow to prime the pump and set the cycle in motion again. And the cash flowing again … public to private, private to public, and so forth and so on.
We’re only now entering that phase of the shutdown of the economic engine where the effects of lost tax revenues are kicking in. Government projects and services of all variety and scope are being curtailed. So, lamentably, Wall Street and the financial services industry, who led us into this ruinous situation, are finally getting what they always wanted and championed. Smaller government. (The trend continues of bad behavior being handsomely rewarded.)
As this new smaller brand of government moves into place, what will be the effect and outcome? Many of those relentlessly disgruntled bankers and industrialists who have long decried government interference in private lives will find their businesses suffering as government spending dries up. It will then become apparent how deeply dependent their own welfare and that of their friends had become regarding those fat government contracts, the ones so reviled in theory yet coveted in practice.
The final nail in the coffin, (which should be cheered resoundingly by true and dedicated conservatives), will be the demise of public education, (at which point the U.S. becomes a third-rate country.) Public education has long been the whipping boy of conservatives. Its exhaustion will be heralded by the right as a bold step forward, as if the problem all along was a lack of desire to provide quality education rather than a chronic shortage of top-notch teachers. It may come as a shock to some that there is now and has always been a shortage of good teachers even as there has always been a shortage of good lawyers, or good bankers, good politicians, good students and, yes, even a shortage of good pundits. (Case in point being self-evident.)
Ours once was not only a capitalistic economic model but, in a sense, a heterosexual one as well, if the term may be employed without offense. Public spending pumped the private sector and free enterprises bore us tax revenues. Bright, bouncing babies they were, too. Those tax dollar then grew up and toddled off to stimulate the next generation of economic activity. Everybody got a little (sumpin’ sumpin’) and all were relatively happy. The economic circle, as then we were able gloriously to sing, was unbroken. And now, oddly enough, (but not too surprisingly), it is the ultra-greedy at the top, (and the radical element among fiscal conservatives who rally wildly ’round their cause), that have mishandled, mangled and queered-up the whole system.
— Clay Wilkinson
Terre Haute
