The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

Last week, Congressman Paul Ryan held a few town hall meetings and was confronted by conservative constituents, once his supporters. They were all opposed to his tax cuts for the richest 2% of the population. The seniors in the audiences added “Keep your hands off our Medicare.” In response, Ryan said he was opposed to all taxes on everybody. But, the Town Hall participants were well trained in arithmetic. They knew that reducing the taxes by even 4% would save 20 times as much for a fat cat making a million a year as for the average working stiff on a $50,000 salary. [Example: 4% of $1 million = $40,000 savings versus 4% of $50,000 = only $2000.] That savings buys the fat cat a lot of Dover sole and rainbow trout. They also saw that the tax cuts meant that government revenues would decline and be the excuse for cutting government spending. Cutting spending meant only one thing: Medicare and Medicaid now … and Social Security 22 minutes later.

Ryan tried to address the logic of the questioners’ math by changing the subject, attacking the President for tax and spend policies. He was shouted down even though he held the microphone. Actually, the Progressive Caucus in Congress does not propose raising taxes; they  want to allow the Bush-Cheney temporary tax cuts to expire as the law stipulates. In fact, they, too, want to cut taxes, but for those earning less than $250,000.

The people at town halls all around the country, 98% of whom make less than $250,000, knew that Medicare has enough in its trust fund to last for about 6 years and the Social Security Trust Fund is flush enough to pay all its obligations for 35 years. They’re worried about jobs — jobs they didn’t have, jobs that were only part time, jobs that might be alienated to India or the Philippines, jobs where those earning good wages could be replaced by low-wage workers with less experience. Paul Ryan et al were worried about 2017 or 2035 when the Trust Funds would start to be less than fully funded to meet their promises to the senior citizens. So, he would hand them over now to the private sector and to all the magic (smoke & mirrors) that Wall Street would devise.

Paul Ryan is not only dissing the seniors and soon-to-be seniors, he’s proposing chainsaw tax cuts for programs that benefit society as a whole so he can balance out the renewal of tax cuts for the giga-rich. Ryan’s creative cuts include: Head Start, Pell grants, National Public Radio, the EPA, community health centers, Planned Parenthood … Although all the cuts don’t add up to much in federal budget numbers, Ryan is saving us from socialism by firing hellfire missiles at targeted agencies and programs. All those young, poor, homeless, and working class people who think they have a right to food, shelter, health care, and the First Amendment!

Beyond the ingenuosity of Ryan and the Ayn Randians who want to eliminate federal deficits and balance the budget, their real goal is far more nefarious. Presently, the richest 1% of the population owns almost 50% of the wealth of the nation. It is hardly a respectable level of avarice. So, Paul Ryan’s attempt to privatize Medicare (and then Social Security) is being added to the mega-agenda of the corporate conspiracy to own closer to 99% of the total wealth of the nation.

First, they wangled federal subsidies to help the record profits of the oil giants. Then, the military contractors — Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing, et al — were provided with a couple of wars and little oversight for orders of lots of ships, planes, and armored vehicles (and the fuel to run them) at retail prices. The costs of 737 US military bases abroad are a significant bonus.

The avoidance of taxes, which the government would otherwise spend for the less than wealthy, was pioneered by Enron: secret off-shore accounts and PO Box subsidiaries in Grand Cayman Island, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, and Dubai. The total is now in the range of three or four trillion dollars. A small help, but nevertheless.

Lastly, the largest money exchange of all has already reached astronomical numbers in two great casinos devised by Wall Street and the corporados. The Gadfly Revelry & Research team has done a deep investigation of the trading practice of Goldman Sachs, the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, AIG, and a few other high rollers. They found, beyond a little investing in stocks & bonds, enormous trading in calls and puts and ‘derivatives’ such as credit default swaps, strangle options, iron butterflies, and other financial ephemera, largely free of fees, oversight, and regulation. This Wall Street gaming makes Bernie Madoff look like a muckworm. Listen to the numbers: the market in derivatives is an astronomical $600 trillion! Soon, Wall Street may have to start counting in light years. Compared to that $600 trillion, the GDP of the entire world is only 58 trillion — all the tea in India, all the rice in China, all the caviar in Russia … In the recent financial crash, Wall Street had gotten Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to give AAA ratings to bundles of securitized debt obligations and then sold such derivatives to various mutual funds  which went into 401k pensions. Some of the goodfellows who ascribe to the philosophy that Greed is Good are thinking up ways to get pension funds into more exotic derivatives. Hold onto your wallets. Compared to the $600 trillion derivatives market, the federal deficit that Paul Ryan is complaining about is less than two trillion.

The fundamental question is: what is real, what is illusion? A billion, a trillion, a zillion? Joy and happiness?