Unfortunately, there was never enough money to address all of the issues or fight the ongoing War on Poverty.
This is the grand lie that both political sides perpetuate to keep the proles in line. The US government is the monopoly source of the US dollar and can never run out of them, regardless of its “tax revenue” (an oxymoron for regular morons). The political class simply decided that the people weren’t capable of making decisions logically and that they couldn’t be allowed to dictate what programs the government funds unless their judgment was tempered with the thought that it was “their” money being spent.
Since the concept of balancing spending with income resonated with those who have to apply it to their everyday budgeting, it was an easy sell. However, it is nowhere near an accurate description of how federal finance/budgeting works. Every “net” dollar in circulation is a product of the US Treasury and is represented by the “national debt” that politicians misrepresent so blatantly, especially around election or appropriations time. Except as an accounting/tracking entity, no obligatory relationship exists between taxes and the debt, nor does that number in any way limit the potential of the currency issuer to spend for the public purpose.
Being poor is not laziness or a lack of ambition. Being poor is a money shortage.
Very few working people are performing “non-essential” jobs. Someone will have to do them if we are going to continue to engage in commerce as we now know it. Anyone who works full time and doesn’t earn enough to supply the most basic needs of survival is the victim of a moral failure on the part of the society, not their own choices. Even if they would follow the normally prescribed path to improve their situation, ie: education and hard work, they would have to be replaced in the workforce by someone else. The only way to avoid the situation is to not allow such jobs to exist.
It’s time to wake up and realize that we have a collective responsibility on a national level to hold out a hand and help the poorest in the nation, who are overwhelmingly women and women of color.
I fully agree, except that I don’t like to see such help doled out discriminately based upon our collective approval of the recipients. Governments create unemployment when they force commerce to be denominated in their respective currencies and they then use those currencies to manage their economy. The US has relegated this responsibility entirely to the business and banking sectors and politicians have successfully vilified government money creation to force the population into servitude to those sectors to supply the basic needs of survival.
The voters, not being econ literate, have given their approval for this, along with joining in the vilification of any “others” not deemed worthy because they operate under the illusion that “their” money is required to improve the lot of anyone not capable of fending for themselves. It isn’t difficult to see how this would suppress wage demands and cause extremes of income/wealth inequity.
Digging just a bit deeper provides evidence that most of our society’s ills can be traced back to this concept of the “haves” providing for the “have nots” and the way that it soon divides us by virtue of race or any other qualifier one may apply to employment. There will always be a “first fired/last hired” segment of the population and a dominant group of decision-makers. The only way to overcome this fact of human nature is for the federal government to become the employer of last resort and set the bottom for all employees in the country.
Once we understand how the federal government manages its financial obligation to the people and that it requires no “revenue” to do so, we can utilize the unlimited potential of dollars as a no-cost commodity in shaping the economy. It wouldn’t take long before the wealthy lose their imaginary status as “job creators” and their protection from taxation that has come to endow them with. When we no longer believe that we depend upon them for our economic well being we will be free to dictate what they are “allowed” to retain as wealth.
