Sounds good until you realize that one of Trump’s proposals in his stimulus package is to suspend the payroll tax which funds Social Security. Even in the face of a national health and economic emergency, opportunistic Trump seeks to cripple Social Security.
by
John Stanton
“Our fundamental
responsibility is to protect the American people, the homeland,
and the American way of
life.” National
Security Strategy of the United States, 2017 (President Donald Trump)
“The United States
government has no greater responsibility than protecting the American people.” National
Security Strategy, 2015 (President Barack Obama)
“At home our most
important priority is to protect the homeland for the American people.” The
National Security Strategy of the United States of Americas, 2002 (President
George W. Bush)
The United States’ National Security Strategy
is based on foundational Instruments
of National Power (INP). The INP consists
of Diplomacy, Informational, Military, Economic, Financial, Law Enforcement,
Information. Combined with the INP’s
support, they combine to protect an economy and society that has an annual
Gross Domestic Product of nearly $20 trillion
(USD) and a per capita income of almost $60 thousand according to the CIA’s World Factbook.
In that publication, the CIA notes that “US firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances,
especially in computers, pharmaceuticals, and medical, aerospace, and military
equipment…”
This
incredible wealth and power, and the mythical status of America’s technologies, could not stop three
disastrous events; two of which could have been prevented (911 and great
recession), and the third mitigated (COVID-19).
Over
the last 19 years, the American people have been exposed to a deadly virus
(COVID-19), a brutal economic recession in 2008, and terrorist attacks in 2001
on two symbols of American power. And in each case, the response of the US
government was to first pump trillions of dollars into Wall Street’s coffers through bailouts and
quantitative easing, while, in comparison, main street got billions of pennies
tossed their way.
The
national security strategies pushed out by three American presidents (two
Republicans and one Democrat) claim the number one priority of the US
government is to protect the American people. But as the three shock and awe
events of the last 19 years demonstrate, the American people that are protected
by the national security strategy are the wealthy and powerful classes and
institutions that run the country from their perches on Wall Street, in the
White House and Congress, and the Pentagon.
The
middle and lower class workers are an afterthought.
Wall Street Mafia
Wall
Street is, in fact, a threat to the country. Its focus on increasing return on
investment for shareholders has crippled investment in the real economy
(infrastructure, retooling, etc.). A better description of Wall Street would be
the Wall Street Mafia. An extortion racket if there ever was one. Consider
Harvard Business Review’s, The Price of Wall Street’s
Power:
“Scholars and executives alike have criticized
Wall Street not only for promoting short-term thinking but for sacrificing the
interests of employees and customers to benefit shareholders and for
encouraging dishonesty from executives who feel they’re being asked to meet impossible demands. The financial sector’s influence on management has become so powerful that a recent
survey of chief financial officers showed that 78% would “give up economic
value” and 55% would cancel a project with a positive net present value—that
is, willingly harm their companies—to meet Wall Street’s targets and fulfill its desire for “smooth” earnings.
Executives often explain their deference to Wall
Street by saying they have a “fiduciary duty” to maximize shareholder returns.
That’s been an article of faith since 1970, when Milton
Friedman wrote in the New York Times that executives’ only responsibility was maximizing profits. The problem, however, is
that it’s not true. Whatever your beliefs about the moral
responsibilities of executives, a fiduciary duty is a specific legal
obligation, and law professor Lynn Stout has shown that as a matter of law
American executives simply do not face any such requirement.
From 1998 through 2013 the finance, insurance, and
real estate industries spent almost $6 billion on lobbying; the only sector to
spend more was health care. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, the financial
sector actually intensified its pressure on the government. Look at the 2013–2014
election cycle: As of March 2014 finance, insurance, and real estate had spent
almost $485 million on lobbying—more than any other industry—and had donated
almost $149 million to the campaigns of federal candidates, nearly three times
as much as health care had donated.
Representatives and lobbyists of the financial
sector are so entwined with the agencies that are supposed to regulate it that
Washingtonians collectively refer to them as “ The Blob.” This is reflected in
the résumés of current and former government officials.
The White House and Congress: Self-Quarantine
for 10 Years, Please
President Trump’s la-dee-da attitude
during the initial spread of COVID-19 should have come as no surprise. A virus
himself, Trump’s
preference would probably have been to let COVID-19 cull the human herd by not
instituting mass testing of the American populace. A dark reading of that
thinking being that people infected would continue to travel around the United
States passing along COVID-19 to others.
Vox reported
that “Politico reporter Dan
Diamond told NPR [National Public Radio] host Terry Gross that, based on his
own reporting, Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing in
recent weeks, and that’s partly because more
testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak,
and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the
better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”
Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
brings to mind a scene in the movie classic Total Recall (1990 version) where
the sinister character Victor Cohagen
(played by Ronnie Cox) is told by an engineer that if he cuts off oxygen supply
to one of the city sectors, inhabitants there will die.
Cohagen:
Yes, what is it?
Underling: Sir, the oxygen level is bottoming out in sector G - what do you
want me to do about it?
Cohagen:
Don't do anything.
Underling: But they won't last an hour sir.
Cohagen: Fuck 'em.
In
the US senate, conservative ideology takes precedent over the suffering of the
American people. The plebes are being slow-rolled. According to USA Today ”Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who chairs the
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, objected to fast-tracking the
legislation. He acknowledged workers are struggling but said businesses are
also struggling and that an expensive federal mandate wouldn’t help them.”
The
general public might have the impression that the US government had no plan of
action for the invasion of the COVID-19 organism. In 2006, President George W.
Bush laid down a template for dealing with a pandemic
that should have been implemented as China (fast forward to 2020), and
subsequently, the rest of the world, coped with the spread of COVID-19. Though
the Bush strategy was focused on influenza, all the core steps the US
government had to take immediately were well articulated.
“The Strategy provides a high-level overview of
the approach that the Federal Government will take to prepare for and respond
to a pandemic, and articulates expectations of non-Federal entities to prepare
themselves and their communities. The Strategy contains three pillars: (1)
preparedness and communication; (2) surveillance and detection; and (3)
response and containment. Preparedness for a pandemic requires the
establishment of infrastructure and capacity, a process that can take years.
For this reason, significant steps must be taken now. The Strategy affirms that
the Federal Government will use all instruments of national power to
address the pandemic threat.
Up, Up and Away, in My
Beautiful Military-Intelligence Balloon
The combined US National Security budget (uniform services,
contractors, nuclear weapons development at the Department of Energy, operations,
etc.) is roughly $1.25 trillion per year, according to an analysis by the Project for Government Oversight (POGO)
and the Center for Defense Information conducted in 2019.
That is a staggering $1.25 trillion in 2019 and you can bet
that going forward that yearly figure is likely to rise. It is the White House
and US Congress that sign off on that amount year after year.
“Our final annual tally for war, preparations for
war, and the impact of war comes to more than $1.25 trillion—more than double
the Pentagon’s base budget. If the
average taxpayer were aware that this amount was being spent in the name of
national defense—with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive—it
might be far harder for the national security state to consume ever-growing
sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the gravy train is running
full speed ahead and its main beneficiaries—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, and their cohorts—are laughing all the way to the bank.”
And
what about the costs for wars on terror, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and its
effects on America’s
economy?
“The War on Terror is a military campaign
launched by President George W. Bush in response to the al-Qaida 9/11 terrorist
attacks. The War on Terror includes the Afghanistan War and the War in Iraq. It
added $2.4 trillion to the debt as of the FY 2020 budget.
The War in Afghanistan has lasted longer than
the Vietnam War. The War in Iraq killed 4,419 U.S. soldiers and wounded 31,994
more.59 Taxpayers have
spent more than $1.52 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
The real cost of the War on Terror is not just
what it has added to the debt. It's also the lost jobs that those funds could
have created. By some estimates, every $1 billion spent on defense creates
8,555 jobs and adds $565 million to the economy.61 That same $1 billion given to you as a tax cut would have
stimulated enough demand to create 10,779 jobs and put $505 million into the
economy as retail spending. And $1 billion in education spending adds $1.3
billion to the economy and creates 17,687 jobs.
Using this model, the $2.4 trillion spent on the
War on Terror created 20 million jobs and added $1.4 trillion to the economy.
But if it had gone toward education instead, it would have created almost 42
million jobs. It would have added $3.1 trillion to the economy. That may have
helped end the recession sooner.”
Trump’s Stimulus
Package
Trump
has proposed about $850 billion in economic stimulus (in addition to the
billions in the House of Representatives aid package lingering in the Senate).
So that’s a
one time shot of about $1 trillion for America’s suffering
plebeians.
Sounds
good until you realize that one of Trump’s
proposals in his stimulus package is to suspend the payroll tax which funds
Social Security. Even in the face of a
national health and economic emergency, opportunistic Trump seeks to cripple
Social Security.
According
to the Motley Fool, “Social
Security collected more than $885 billion in payroll tax contributions in 2018,
the most recent year for which the Social Security trustees have made
information available. That represented the vast majority of the roughly $1
trillion in revenue that Social Security received, and it was enough to pay almost
90% of all the benefits that Social Security recipients got that year.If Social
Security stopped receiving that $885 billion, the impact would be immediate.
Benefits would have to get funded almost entirely by trust fund balances. With
asset levels of about $2.9 trillion, the program could only go for four years
before using up its entire savings. Even if a payroll tax cut lasted only for
the last nine months of 2020, the roughly $660 billion hit would dramatically
accelerate the time at which the trust funds would be empty.”
In
1972, President Richard Nixon compared the average American to a young child in
a family. Nothing has changed in 2020. Wall Street, the White House, the US
Congress and the Pentagon treat the American people as children.
The
lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s song, This Land is Your Land ring
true in 2020 just as they did in the original version in 1940::
“As
I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And
on the sign there, it said “Private
Property.”
But
on the other side, it didn't say nothing!
That
side was made for you and me.
In
the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple,
By
the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As
they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is
this land made for you and me? (Woody Guthrie)
John Stanton can be reached at jstantonarchangel.com. His
most recent book is America 2020: A Nation in Turmoil. It
is free on Kindle.
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