Pylimitics

I spent many years paying fairly rudimentary attention to “the economy.” It was never an academic subject that interested me, and a lot of what I skimmed by and about economists seemed to me poorly reasoned nonsense. People studying and opining about the subject seemed to me to be particularly prone to directed reasoning; they decided what they wanted to “prove” and set about creating excuses for it. So my eventual assumption was that economists and their field were not much better than scam artists. The “Nobel Prize for Economics” is one example. It’s not a Nobel prize at all. It’s a fake, created by a bank in Sweden “in honor” of Alfred Nobel. It’s not awarded by the actual Nobel committee.

Nevertheless, economic bafflegab seems to capture mindshare to a surprising extent, especially among other pundits, politicians, and business droids. After all, there have always been plenty of “economists” available to pseudo-justify bad actors if their bad actions are based on naked greed.

What I didn’t realize until more recent years was that the influence of these intellectual shysters is real, and goes very deep. And it’s behind the decline and fall of the western-world order we’ve inhabited for the past, oh, 75-odd years.

Here’s what stood out to me just this week: the US national debt has reached forty trillion dollars. This is an unimaginable sum. And the current administration is of the party that makes a lot of noise about that debt being too high. But if you look at the data over past administrations, the debt goes up during Republican regimes and down during Democratic regimes. Exactly the opposite of what their rhetoric argues.

I think there’s a reason for radical right-wing debt expansion: it’s a hidden system for redistribution of wealth upward. The reason is simple. US debt is loans. Loans have payments that include interest and principal. Those payments are made, indirectly, by US taxpayers. Most US taxes are paid by the bottom 80% to 90% of the population, but the payments are collected by the top few percentages. That’s because these particular loans are in the form of bonds, and bonds are held by the wealthy, and by funds and corporations they also own, through investments and stocks that the rest of us mostly can’t afford any more.

So of course the radical right (and here I mean Republicans, nowadays) raise the national debt, and of course they still rail against it. Just follow the money, and stop listening to radical-right bafflegab. In fact, stop listening to any bafflegab. The data, which they haven’t yet hidden or deleted (but just wait), tells the tale.

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Image: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=236881