Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Austerity for Thee, More Money for the Elites

Either supremely evil bastards or ignorant and insulated from laws of basic economics.  Oddly enough, a few beers makes me lean towards lenient view of merely ignorant.  Whiskey, however, makes me feel mean and want to fry the bastards.


[WASHINGTON -- The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives.

But the austerity game also has winners. Cutting or eliminating government programs that benefit the less advantaged has long been an ideological goal of conservatives. Doing so also generates a tidy windfall for the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.

U.S. financial interests that stand to gain from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cutbacks "have been the core of the big con," the "propaganda," that those programs are in crisis and must be slashed, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas.]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/austerity-wall-street_n_1690838.html

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