The manifesto begins “Policy makers should acknowledge that our growing debt is a serious threat to the economic well-being and security of the United States.” Felix deconstructs as follows:
This is ridiculous. There are lots of serious threats out there to the economic well-being and security of the United States, and the national debt is simply not one of them. Nor is it growing. The chart on the right [not shown], from Rex Nutting, shows what’s actually going on: total US debt to GDP was rising alarmingly until the crisis, but it has been falling impressively since then. In fact, this is the first time in over half a century that US debt to GDP has been going down rather than up.
So when the CEOs talk about “our growing debt”, what they mean is just the debt owed by the Federal government. And when the Federal government borrows money, that doesn’t even come close to making up for the fact that the CEOs themselves are not borrowing money.
Money is cheaper now than it has been in living memory: the markets are telling corporate America that they are more than willing to fund investments at unbelievably low rates. And yet the CEOs are saying no. That’s a serious threat to the economic well-being of the United States: it’s companies are refusing to invest for the future, even when the markets are begging them to.
If these guys really cared about the size of the national debt, which they surely don’t, they would say “eliminate farm subsidies, energy subsidies, corporate subsidies, cut defense spending in half, and take on the anti-competitive health industry, including the doctors, the hospitals, the insurance companies, and the drug companies, none of whom betray any interest in the free-market system that we all love to pretend that we desire.” But of course they don’t. They bemoan the recent damage to America’s credit, which occurred while, again, they sat on their hands while the Republicans in Congress engineered an entirely phony crisis, basically threatening to destroy the nation’s economy if President Obama did not commit political suicide. And yet the CEOs prate of a “bipartisan” compromise. They do so because they hope that the Republicans will give them what they truly desire, lower taxes on their already obscene fortunes, and even less regulation, allowing them to unleash their inner hyena, as they did in the good old days, before the recent unpleasantness.
Read Felix on this one. He’s right on the money.
