John Nichols, in a useful rejoinder to so much of the economic and political nonsense flying around as the GOP readies to take control of the House, that it is the people who created the mess we are in who should pay to fix it.
Our sputtering economy and exhausted federal budget was not caused by entitlement spending, but by a regulatory climate that turned the financial markets into Atlantic City casinos and two endless wars that are daily sucking the cash from our bank accounts and leaving the blood of soldiers and civilians on both sides to stain the countrysides.
And yet, we still hear from the “Washington elites … that the U.S. had spent itself into a financial mess” and that “it was going to be necessary to put Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs at risk to balance the books.”
That is both foolish and immoral.
As Nichols says,
there is a place for fiscal responsibility. But there is also a place for moral responsibility. Those who created the mess should shoulder the burden of cleaning it up. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid did not create this crisis, war profiteering and Wall Street speculation did. So before any working family sacrifices, the first demand should be that the profiteers and the speculators pay for their crisis.
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Hank Kalet 