Barking Up the Wrong Tree

That big political food fight last month in the US Congress is a sensational bit of theatre, but it misses the real problem with the US economy.

From the Washington's Blog:

Harvard’s Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ... with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion.

If the US wants to cut the deficit & debt, it needs to stop fighting wasteful, useless wars.

Instead of focusing on where their belly has been slit and the intestines are falling out, the US lawmakers made a huge racket over a paper cut on a finger. They bawled, they wailed. They shrieked enough to scare the world into a month-long plunge in the financial markets. But they were fighting over small potatoes. If the politicians were serious, they would look at the US military budget and at the insane amount of money they have spent doing "wars of choice" and "nation building" and other fruitless, stupid activities.

And while they had this shouting match over deficits and debts, the lawmakers have done nothing serious about the corruption and crime on Wall Street:

He concludes fraud is the heart of Wall Street. Under the poignant title, Goldman Sachs: Too Big to Obey the Law: “The behavior and de facto immunity of the biggest banks is out of control.” He cites the financial crisis was engineered by the largest banks to consolidate power: in 1995 the leading six banks had assets of 17% of US GDP; today they have 63%.

Wow! Who says crime doesn't pay? The Wall Street bankers sure know how to make crime pay and pay and pay. They have literally bilked the taxpayer out of billions and left the economy in a $10 trillion recession and yet nobody has been arrested and nobody is even under investigation!