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Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his support of the Civil Rights Act was too bold and politically risky, famously responded: “What else is the presidency for?”
The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-states in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and squalor. What else is a country’s spectacular wealth for, other than to provide a high standard of living for its citizens?
A leftist economic program should begin with the government’s budget. How should revenues be collected, and from whom? How should the money be spent? The Left must articulate a holistic approach to the federal budget.
According to the U.S. Treasury’s website: “The federal government collects revenue from a variety of sources, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It also collects revenue from services like admission to national parks and customs duties.” This came to $4.44 trillion in 2023. The biggest source of this cash bonanza was income taxes.
In addition, states and cities took in about $2 trillion.
$6 trillion is, to state the most obviously obvious thing in the world, a staggering, enormous amount of money. Yet we rarely take a beat to take in that fact.
Part of the reason is that it doesn’t feel like we live in a rich country with a huge amount of taxes coming into its coffers. It sure doesn’t look like one. People sleep on the streets. Factories are abandoned. Schools are worn. Hospitals are chaotic, understaffed and depressing. Storefronts are boarded up. Litter abounds. Bridges collapse; subways derail; doors fall off airplanes; high-speed rail and free college and affordable health care are for other countries.
Why can’t we have nice things? One can blame cycles and systems: late-stage capitalism, the duopoly, the corrupt revolving door between business and the government officials who are supposed to regulate them. Fundamentally, the answer boils down to bad priorities. The people in charge would rather spend our money on the things that they care about than what we want and need: sending weapons to other countries instead of feeding the poor, tax breaks for corporations rather than treating young men addicted to opioids, building more prisons in lieu of hiring social workers.
Reordering a society’s social and economic priorities is a complex task. To keep things relatively simple, let’s set aside the comparatively lesser and infinitely more diffuse state and local budgets in order to focus upon the federal budget — round it up to $5 trillion — as the principal engine in the Left’s proposed shift of the U.S. to a country that puts people first. Further to the goal of simplification, let’s assume that overall revenues remain flat in real terms adjusted for inflation — no tax cuts or hikes, no significant changes in tariffs like a trade war.
The most recent U.S. military budget, for 2024, comes in at $886 billion — by far the biggest expense, and greater than all other federal spending combined. And that’s radically understating the real cost of militarism. As the socialist journal Monthly Review calculates, when you include costs associated with medical and other expenses related to veterans, debt service on deficit spending for old wars and military aid to foreign countries, the real number doubles. So the actual 2024 total is closer to $1.6 trillion.
We’re recognizing that nothing makes us less safe than a forward, aggressive military posture in which U.S. forces and proxies are stationed around the globe. They are sitting ducks and provocateurs. A Left worthy of its name favors a military apparatus capable of defending the U.S. — nothing more, nothing less. We need missile defenses, border protections, a naval force to protect our coasts, the kind of domestically focused armed forces that could have effectively responded to the 9/11 attacks. Given our exceptionally secure geographical situation, surrounded by two vast oceans and directly bordered only by two nations, both close allies, we can get defense — the real thing, not the hegemony we buy with the Department of Defense — on the cheap.
Chalmers Johnson, the academic and great critic of the American empire, called the Pentagon to ask for a list of its overseas bases; not only could they not produce such a list, they could only estimate the number. (It’s 800, more or less.) Not knowing how many bases you have is a major sign of overextension. So is the reaction, when learning that one of your country’s soldiers has been killed in combat, of surprise that we were in that nation in the first place. We should close every last one and bring every last soldier and sailor home.
Brazil, a regional superpower that is bigger than the contiguous 48 states, has a military budget of $20 billion. That’s a rounding error, 0.25% of ours. Of course, Brazil doesn’t wage wars or plant bases on the opposite side of the planet — and neither should we. We can spend that 99.75% of that $1.6 trillion on stuff that helps rather than kills.
Next week, a look at other federal budget expenses the Left should slash so we can redirect those precious funds to addressing our wants and needs.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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The answer here is quite simple. Since Reagan changed things, the US is all about predatory capitalism. Private equity, hedge funds, and corporations invest to produce private profit even if it destroys public good. To end that, all capital expenses must be managed by the government for the public good. That is what they do in China and Japan.
As to taxes, we need to end all taxes. We need to replace them with a modern “unitary tax” which should be a wealth tax levied on individuals. A wealth tax taxes everything done by corporations and by partnerships and by LLCs and all other economic activity as the wealth always devolves to individuals.
There is a leakage, that is private foundations, college endowments and the like. The answer is to pass a rule that all taxable assets (wealth) may be held in the name of natural persons only. Thus a college endowment, for example, would be held in the name of the college president and subject to wealth tax.
The key part to what I said is central capital planning. This would mean, for example, we might end capital investment in air craft and instead build out high speed rail.
At the government level, we would create universal basic income and national health insurance and end all private medical care.
We would reverse Reagan era mental health de-institutionalization and rebuild the mental hospitals.
There is more to be said, but that is the basic reframing.
The Military does need a purpose, .. it’s obviously not defending our borders.
Our modern economy was created mostly from military spending. It brought you: gps, drones, radar, microwave ovens, jet airplanes, synthetic fabrics, satellites and their technology, spread spectrum technology (used in our cellular networks), smartphone technology (an Italian economist found 98% of the technology in smart phones comes from the U.S. DOD), undershirts, instant coffee, tampons, bug sprays, duct tape, microprocessors, micro hard drives, lcd displays, many types of signal compression, Li batteries, DRAM cache, touch screens, internet, .. the list goes on and on.
Our modern economy owes its existence to this defense spending that most people think is wasteful. When the DOD develops new systems, it infuses military discipline into engineering. It first schedules 5-10-15 years “roadmaps” of R&D studies, before it develops a technology. These studies are done by Defense companies that then use the results to respond to proposals. In our National Missile Defense programs where I worked on studies and proposals, the results were used in 45-60 day proposal efforts to compete against other defense companies. Those proposal effort are simply amazing. In short 45-60 days periods, you see the world’s most advanced engineering revolutionizing technology that has never existed. It takes much discipline and rigor to produce these technologies and systems, something that is lacking in commercial companies. The Commercial engineering typically follows no standards, few procedures, and lack rigor and discipline — they are hobby shops. The marriage of a soldiers’ discipline with engineering and research produced our modern economy.
Since the Cold War ended, revolutionary technological change has stopped. Worse yet, this country’s morals no longer flow up from the disciplined military world. Instead, they flow up from effeminate teachers who teach children to think and behave like them. I think the key to evolutionary and revolutionary advancement is a military culture. This country should replace all public schools with military schools. Military service should be mandatory for all people.
Hi. 20 billion is 2.5% of 800 billion, not 0.25%. Regards. JS
I wholeheartedly agree that we should drastically downsize our military and redirect the untold billions of newly available dollars towards more beneficial stuff. We could give that money to regular people to help them pay for their health insurance.
I gotta say though that there’s evidence of capitalist America being a rich country. Like there’s at least six fast casual or fast food chains that have a good chicken sandwich: McDonald’s, Zaxby’s, PDQ, Shake Shack, Chik-Fil-A, Popeye’s, and Culver’s. Other countries have maybe one chain with a good chicken sandwich.
100% agree with this article.
What percentage of the population is directly or indirectly (MIC, welfare) employed/supported by our ever-expanding government? When the dwindling feeder matrix can’t support the gang, switch on the money printers.
The military consists of blacks Hispanics thugs and deranged drug addicts. I suggest you leave your rural area and drive to towns near big military bases. And take a good look at the American army. Just black drugged criminals and brawlers. You’ve been watching too many WW2 movies. Both the VA hospitals and the military medical services preform transgender surgery and sex transition services. for active duty soldier and sailors.
Mr. Rall:
As I pointed out in a response to your previous blog post, “Official Lies Aren’t What They Used to Be”, this is absolutely wrong. Well more than half of the federal budget is non-discretionary spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the federal deficit. Direct military spending is just over one-sixth of the total federal budget and even considered as a fraction of just the discretionary budget is less than one-third. See the pie chart here for some details: https://sites.psu.edu/erlcivicissue/2022/02/16/the-problem-with-national-debt/.
The biggest slice of the budget, 53.3% is for SSN , Medicare, and Medicaid. These, along with the steadily growing interest payment on the national debt, constitute so called obligations, or non-discretionary or mandatory budget items. Spending on “defense and homeland security” accounts for only 16.2% of total federal spending or less than a third of the discretionary federal budget.
After my original post, you have no excuse for so thoroughly misleading your readers. At this point I am assuming that you are deliberately lying.
I believe that the federal government’s grotesque levels of military spending are a disaster. We agree on this. But lying about the true reality only provides ammunition for opponents of our position.
You clearly have little grasp of the federal budget or the federal budget process. Reading this https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46468 would be a good start towards correcting your ignorance. Some really important concepts: (1) appropriations versus authorizations, which is one way congress critters use to bamboozle the public; (2) the distinction between mandatory expenditures versus discretionary; (3) the twenty-seven Senate and Congressional Budget Committees, whose chairs are so powerful that they are informally referred to as cardinals.
We aren’t rich. We’re 33 trillion dollars in debt and growing fast.
We have a hollowed-out industrial sector and our “””GDP””” is largely based on financialization schemes, the outlook of which is not bright in the face of a global de-dollarization trend.
We aren’t rich. We’re a sinking ship. Once again Ted reveals himself as an out of touch moron who hasn’t evolved his political outlook since the 90s.
USA isn’t a nation-state.
Welcome to acetaminophen for all, drugged populace (you will do nothing and be happy), and eventually food rationing.
Our Founders were against standing armies for a reason. Yes, American men would volunteer to fight. But peacetime enlisted military were just a little higher than traveling carnies on the respect scale. Our morals have never flowed from a “disciplined military world”. It flowed from independent and free White men. I will take the America of 1900 over that of 2000 any day of the week.
You are mostly correct, but instead of $33 trillion in debt, we have topped $34T and it’ll only take a few months to hit $35T and keep going sky high. The US is borrowing massive amounts just to pay the interest on the debt.
Even worse, the debt pales in comparison to well over $200T in promised future outlays for which there is no funding source.
The US is NOT a rich country. A truly rich country is able to live well and do so within its means. Ours has a big credit card and confuses that with wealth. What can not go on indefinitely will one day stop, and it won’t be pretty.
“A leftist economic program should begin with the government’s budget.”
Wrong. The buzzer goes AAAAaaah! If this were a game show a light would blink SHITLIB and a hook would come out and yank you offstage. Fortunately you are slightly less politically relevant than the 14th episode of the Gong Show, so there’s no harm done by your Biden-grade cognitive impairment.
Any state’s claim of sovereignty must begin with acknowledgement of state duties. Any economic program must commit all available state resources to your rights until all your rights are fulfilled. Admissible budget line items are articles of the core human rights treaties. Period. If you can’t justify a budget chapter-and-verse, your schizoid daydreams of statecraft are too embarrassing to disclose in public. It would be better if you told us about your paraphilia fantasies. Have you ever daydreamed of eating a shit sandwich? On what kind of bread? What consistency would get you most aroused, pasty, chunky, runny? No really, that would contribute more to civic discourse.
“Stuff that helps rather than kills” is a nice bumper-sticker slogan suitable for politically helpless party dupes. What you mean is rights.
How hard is it to RTFM? It’s like six fuckin pages.
Some thought on comment two, first, can ef off on ‘mandatory’ anything, as the cons ‘constitutions’ and paper ‘law is fraud and tyrany same as their murder pervert ‘military, see ‘covid’ and fraud ‘wars, also on claim – ‘modern economy was created mostly from military spending. It brought you: gps, drones, radar. .’ etc – supposed
‘e con o me’ is a con word, and claiming some sort of benefit of ‘military’ to anyone but the death cons is false, same as ‘police’. ‘tax by threat, so cons could get themselves weapons. Further, note ‘list without irrelevant ‘tampons’ etc –
– ‘gps, drones, radar, jet airplanes, synthetic fabrics, satellites, spread spectrum technology (used in our cellular networks), smartphone technology (an Italian economist found 98% of the technology in smart phones comes from the U.S. DOD), microprocessors, micro hard drives, lcd displays, many types of signal compression, Li batteries, DRAM cache, touch screens, internet ’
Theres no ‘our’ anything, also, no such thing as ‘satellites’, and every other thing is weapons for cons, spying and destruction. That includes ‘jets, were for con travel to do schemes, and mass murder, and push drugs, and traffic children, and spraying such as in vietnam and here, and mass in-migration, and drones to assault us, etc. Should make note. Ignorants using planes for ‘vacation’ was only temporary.
Their ‘tech’ to bait everyone to get ‘in the box’, ‘inter net’ or ‘fones so dopes continue failing to connect with others and tribe, where we live, and be serious. Also, by everyone being ‘on’, they know what thinking or saying, by nano chips in everyone, also part of how brains connected to ‘web’, and ‘gps’ to know where we are, to target with drones. The fact I’m posting comment is irrelevant, and why I say most important is focus sharing info where we live, off web, not in the box.
Short version, most list is to benefit to cons schemes. ‘undershirts or ‘tampons irrelvant, and we used herbs a hundred thousand years to repel bugs before bs ‘spray.
On the article its mistake to expect ‘state cons do anything but threats and destruction, though it has point as it shows money trilions, or printing, to do what they want.
Theres no ‘we, or ‘country or ‘nation, its a territory, with cons dictating, and people failing to push back or make own effort.
If we want something, or to be alive, effort is necessary, to direct selves. In that much comparisons in article are worth note.
Actually, we should outlaw obesity. We should by law regulate what you eat and for school children, college kids, and anyone with a state issued license, have regular weigh ins.
The debt is not an issue, actually. If you have read David Ricardo (19th century economist), you simply tax the holders of the debt to repay it. Ricardo taught they expect that to happen. Back in the 1970s the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis “tested” Ricardo’s hypothesis and validated it. We could have zero debt tomorrow if we taxed the holders of the debt–recall we already have their cash.
The actual reason we do not do that is the debt holders are politically powerful and seek to shift the burden of repaying the debt to the middle class and poor.
All the mumbo jumbo about default is a game.
We could tax the debt itself, or we could tax the interest on the debt at a rate that exceeded 100%. That would cause debt holders to surrender bonds instead of “taking” interest payments.
From Comment #1, above.
Well, now, wait a minute. We need to end all taxes, then replace them with more taxes? How can this be? A tax is a tax and simply calling it something other than what it is does not make it go away. Either we are going to be tax-free or we are not. Which is it?
Here you advocate for taxing debt holders to generate revenue to pay the debt. Great, you borrow money at interest, then force the lender to make the payments himself. After all, they have already given their loose cash to us, we might as well take the rest of their wealth.
Truly, you have hit on a system of “having your cake and eating it too”. To be consistent, why don’t you advocate for 100% confiscation of all wealth (not income) by the government which it can then redistribute as it sees fit.
Regardless, the truth is that taxation is theft. It is accomplished by violence and force or the threat thereof. In essence, it is extortion. The fact that it is done by government does not change this one whit.
Theft is the taking of property against the will of the owner and it is certain that much (most, all?) of government revenue is collected from unwilling “donors”. It does not matter what the government policies are nor what is hoped to accomplish. The end does not justify the means. Social “good” does not justify legal (not lawful) taking.
Negroes.
Practically no one that has negroes has nice things, anywhere.
Glad Ted is back.
When the Seventies antiwar left disliked society, a select few made their own communes that lasted a number of years. California is full of underdeveloped towns that died with interstate highways. Youth could revitalize, if they wanted to & had the smart leadership. The cultural will is so far,not there.
There is a poverty industry but its on a patchwork city, county, and statewide basis.
He’s probably a baby-boomer moron thinking this is still the 1960’s.
Of course he is. All zoglodytes are liars, at the very least, who rely on spin, fabulist narratives, and outright fabrications to paper over the reality of Zionist LBJ’s ZOG-serving Welfare/Warfare state, aka Big Brother. And these are just the Boomer zoglodytes. The FDR zoglodytes were equally crazy, stupid and evil–all controlled by the vile Cousinhood.
These creeps are so dumb and evil, they might even believe some of their shyster narratives — if they’re paid enough filthy lucre, ZOG plantation loot — golden calf Ponzi dividends. It’s nothing but a vast pyramid scheme.
They’ve all fallen for the murderous “Jewish Century” grift, which feeds on low character and rewards liars, shysters, grifters and confidence men. Liars and murderers “from the beginning.”
Harry Huntington is our resident communist commenter.
He advocates the abolition of personal transportation, the forced “relocation” of us mundanes into “15 minute cities” (Gaza ring a bell?) and telling us that “it is for our own good”.
Harry Huntington needs to “get a life” or crawl back into his IDF unit 8200 cubicle.
Central planning has NEVER worked…
Before modern computers, the War Production Board did a great job centrally planning the US economy for WWII. Economists have known since Nixon, that with modern computers we could quite efficiently plan and manage the US economy. Japan has centrally planned its economy, principally capital allocation for years. China has also successfully centrally planned its economy, which is why it is growing leaps and bounds faster than the US economy. The US economy today suffers from failed infrastructure, no passenger rail, no high speed rail, wasteful urban and suburban design because we allow private interest and profit to dominate over public good. The United States reminds us that private profit always fails.