Why Obama’s Budget Sell-Out to Republicans Threatens Our Economy | | AlterNet.
Robert Reich makes an impassioned argument here for a radical increase in income tax progressivity: for exempting low and moderate income Americans from the tax and socking it to the wealthy. It’s good to see Reich thundering like this, but there are two problems with his approach. (1) In the current political atmosphere, his proposal is as “utopian” as full-scale socialism. (2) Even so, it remains in the mode of liberal economic tinkering and does not deal with fundamental structural issues like military Keynesianism — our dependence on a handful of giant military-industrial corporations to generate the demand that an over-the-hill capitalist system can’t produce.
We need a greatly enlarged, redesigned, popularly controlled public sector of the economy to do this. Enough “Pentagon socialism”! On to economic democracy! But how can we help Americans recognize that economic self-determination is needed, that it is their right, and that it is the next stage in democracy’s evolution? What will bring us to our own Tahrir Square?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’m not sure how we do it. My only hope is that our children, the ones who are really getting screwed, will figure out how. Perhaps we will see them on the Mall again soon, and not to honor a comic.