Cutting Benefits: Alice in Wonderland Economics

[Joanne98]

Congress and the President along with all his merry men must have failed simple arithmetic in public school and never fully recovered. They add when they are really subtracting and subtract when they are really adding. They obviously excelled in one subject, literature, given their understanding and applying the principles of one book: Alice in Wonderland.

Washington is not about real people and real lives but about the belief that economics is science, that market economics really operates in the real world, that tax cuts stimulate the economy, that cuts to benefits strengthens economic fundamentals, that wars serve American interests. Lewis Carol would turn green with envy.

When Congress subtracts from benefits to the unemployed, it is really adding to poverty, foreclosures, and hunger. The bill under consideration in Congress regarding extending benefits to the unemployed while at the same time proposing tax cuts is lunatic economics.

Such propaganda about salvaging the budget is as antediluvian as the horse and buggy. Anyone with a basic understanding of economics and who accepts the axiom that economics is about people would instantly recognize that the best way to stimulate the economy is to give money to people who will not only spend it at the corner store but immediately. Adding to unemployment payments, Medicaid and Food Stamps would be the quickest way to increase aggregate demand not tax cuts, which would probably wind up in some kind of speculative bubble-inducing investment that has no productive value.

When Congress subtracts tax cuts from its revenues, it almost exclusively benefits the rich and it is adding to the number of people living in poverty, the number of people who are unemployed and the number of people living in the streets.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Cutting-Benefits-Alice-in-by-David-Model-101207-363.html

[cutlassmama]

1. They don't care. The rich don't care about the poor. Sociopaths have no

conscience.

[cate94]

2. K & R

Absolutely true.

Even worse, cutting the taxes for the wealthy will cause the deficit to soar, and cutting Social Security will "be the only choice". These tax cuts for the wealthy come at the expense of the poor, the disabled and the elderly.