Both Political Parties Conspire to Keep You Unemployed

I bet you had no idea that both political parties were conspiring to pay off their friends with your paycheck and your retirement account. From the vantage point of an American voter, it seems like the two major political parties pursue completely opposite political goals. Republicans want to cut taxes on wealthy people; Democrats want to raise taxes on wealthy people. Republicans want to cut spending; Democrats want to raise spending. They disagree on just about everything, or so they'd have you believe. In reality, at least in the economic realm, on each political issue the two parties are merely two sides of the same coin. While their policies directly appeal to one group or another, the indirect benefits of the policies always work out to benefit the very wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes. In other words, the game is rigged. Whether you play or not, you lose and they win. Take the economy as a whole. In an ideal world, there would be full employment, and enough housing, medical care, food, education, and other benefits to ensure that everyone had their needs met. Yet, economists will tell you that full employment is a terrible idea because it drives inflation higher. The powerful people who make their wealth loaning money to the rest of the world have absolutely no interest in seeing their investment watered down with inflated dollars. Why do you think they bothered to structure the Federal Reserve the way they did? It's a private corporation with the power to set the interest rate across the nation, and with it, the world. It also has taken on the task of managing — you guessed it — inflation for the nation. How convenient. It takes a somewhat twisted mind to argue that some people have to be unemployed in order for all of us to prosper, but that is exactly the premise that the financial elite operate under. Whether the target is 1%, 2%, or 10%, the economic system of the United States has a goal that guarantees human misery and suffering for some percentage of its citizens. It is wholly disgusting that one political party builds a system that guarantees unemployment for some and then argues against social safety net programs that would at least mitigate the damage of unemployment. Yet, that is what Republicans do, isn't it? Create a system where a certain percentage of people have to be unemployed for it to work properly, and then deny those affected folks their basic human minimum existence? Not that Democrats fare much better in this calculus. Knowing that some folks will be out of work permanently means they, caring for the lower classes, ought to make damn sure that there always is and always will be a social safety net. Take another issue, tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans argue for them, explaining that cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations will fuel job growth, providing benefits for everyone. What they leave off is the fact that tax money has to come from someone, somewhere. They might push unemployment levels down, but they'll do so at the cost of lower-paying jobs (in real dollars) and a decline in tax revenues necessary to support the social safety net. Democrats argue against them, pointing out that wealthy people already have a pile of money that they aren't investing; giving them more money isn't going to spur more investment. That's fine, but the argument also needs to be made that, at some point, tax rates go high enough to encourage investors to take their yuans and run. Social Security is another issue where the wealthy win no matter what happens. Republicans call it a Ponzi scheme and say it should be abolished in favor of a private market solution. Democrats call it a central feature of the American system, and something that should be funded to keep old people from starving. Let's look at both sides. Republicans would replace Social Security with private accounts which would, naturally, pay fees and a percentage to Wall Street. Many of our readers are brokers; do any of you work for free? Doubtful. What better way to empower your allies than to hand over trillions of dollars in automatic deposits and collect the fees? Democrats are more than willing to let the system ride, even though it barely provides the minimum for poor folks, and ends up paying for vacations and summer homes for the wealthier elderly folks who receive it. Either way, you lose: your job (to keep unemployment above zero) or your home (to protect bank assets, but not yours) or your education (privatizing schools) or your security (private cops, prisons, and military).