One of the standard lines about the national debt is that it's saddling our children and grandchildren with backbreaking debt, and that cutting programs that feed today's children and grandparents will somehow alleviate that. Uh, no. Or only if you figure by cutting these people off, they will die and stop being a burden. Debt is only a burden if interest rates on it are high, or if its existence or level will prevent you from doing something you want to do, like borrow more money. Interest rates on present federal debt are well below inflation, and the only people that are even suggesting that there might be a problem with the creditworthyness of the national treasury are the very people who are trying to wreck its creditworthness: the Tea Party and their backers.
All of these backers are fabulously wealthy businessmen. These are people who have built, or more often, inherited a business built by exploiting the labor or naivety of those much less well off, often by mining a resource they were given by the same federal government they are now trying to weaken. What they want is to be able to exploit at will--to pay people such low wages and benefits that when they become unable or unwilling to work, they can simply be discarded and replaced with someone even more desperate for a job. To mine and pollute and lay waste to the environment and either ignore the cost or foist it off on somebody less able to resist having to pay for their carnage.
Individually, each of these businessmen (and a few businesswomen), is making a rational business decision. If they cut costs by paying less, by evading or overturning regulation, they are able to outcompete their competitors and gain a larger piece of the regional or global economic pie. Many of these people went to business school. One of the fields they studied there was called economics. Economics is split into two broad sub-disciplines, called Microeconomics (the study of individual businesses and their individual interactions with their neighboring businesses), and Macroeconomics, which is the study of entire systems of businesses as a whole--regions, countries, the whole planet. Business students generally spend a few weeks in a freshman economics course learning Macro, and after the final in that course, proceed to forget it all, focusing exclusively on Micro and other aspects of business.
Macro is a very different field than Micro, in the same way that structural engineering is a very different field than chemistry. The chemistry of concrete and steel are important and fundamental to whether the bridge will hold up, but they are only a small part of the picture. Here's an example of how they are different: to an individual business, gaining market share is a good thing: more customers, more employees, the chance at better profits. But what if that bigger business is undermining the overall market. A community that once had a thousand individual businesses employing five thousand people, finds them replaced by WalMart, employing 1000. During the transition, it seems like a great deal: prices are better and lots of jobs were created, building and working in the new store, but before long, most of the old businesses are gone and the profits are mostly going to Bentonville, not staying in the community as before. And to compound the injury, the community probably gave WalMart a big tax break to get them into their town instead of the neighbors.
At the microeconomic level, money is an immutable, powerful thing: you are competing with your rivals for it, and it feels like the only thing that matters. At the macroeconomic level, money is an illusion. Money is a token, representing goods and services, no more. The only thing that matters to the economy is goods and services. If there's demand for those, then the economy does well and lots of people have jobs. Extracting money by taking it to Bentonville or Wall Street and burying it there, means that those people own that fraction of your labor--before you even get paid. That money, and therefore that part of the work people do, is gone from the real economy, it's now part of Wall Street schemes, and stuck there, producing little or nothing. MBAs by and large do not understand this: they only see the world through their myopic lens of individual competition. The price of inequality is a smaller economy.
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