Washington's Sequester: Into the Vast Inane

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/01-5

Someone asked the Master about the principles of … traveling into the vast inane.

– From the Bao Pu Zi, AD 320,
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China



***SNIP

Sadly, that old economy is back. Consider the unsustainable imbalances that contributed directly to the Great Recession:

Global trade imbalances: The U.S. trade deficit is still over $1 billion a day. The trade deficits with China remain the largest bilateral imbalances in history. This costs the U.S. good jobs and undermines wage growth. The Chinese suppress consumption in their own country to sustain their export-led growth. This imbalance is destabilizing and unsustainable, but is not up for discussion. Instead, the administration and the Republican leadership push traditional corporate trade accords that will only add to the problem.

Gilded-Age Inequality: In the two years coming out of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent captured an obscene 121 percent of the income growth, while the remaining 99 percent lost ground. The rich pocketed all the new income growth and then some. Corporate profits are setting new records as a percentage of the economy; wages are setting new lows. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued, extreme inequality not only crushes the middle class, it saps the demand needed for a prosperous economy.

It also corrodes our democracy and corrupts our politics. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for raising the minimum wage, but deficit jockeying is consuming the limited congressional calendar, curtailing any discussion of even this modest reform. Also needed are measures to empower workers to organize and bargain collectively for a fair share of the profits and productivity they help to produce. Corporate tax reform should offer lower rates to those companies that create jobs at home rather than abroad and that limit the divergence between the median wages of workers and the compensation of the top executives. Instead, Republicans are waging war against unions and basic worker rights, and CEOs continue to receive million-dollar short-term incentives to plunder their own companies.