Taxes, guns and butter

The allocation of resources to producing guns or butter is a classic macroeconomic model.

Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are promising everything, giving no details, and insisting that it won't hurt a bit.  They give absolutely no specifics - other than ending support to PBS for programming like Sesame Street and news programming.  They claim to want to improve education, in which we have been steadily slipping in comparison to other developed countries (which spend more than we do on education).

To every tax group, they promise tax cuts; they assert they will close loopholes......but never state which ones, only list the ones they WON'T close. They offer fuzzy, failed Republican math where the economic numbers don't add up.

Romney and Ryan are also promising ENORMOUS increases in military spending, including spending that the pentagon DOES NOT WANT OR NEED. What our military DOES recommend and want is for more money to be spent on early childhood education -- the stuff that Sesame Street provides.

The irony to reducing support for programming like Sesame Street, while claiming to want to strengthen and expand our military is that it is our military that is pressing for expansion of early childhood education in order to provide later qualified individuals to serve in our armed forces.

And if there were any doubt that Big Bird and PBS-provided early childhood education were good for the economy as well as our military.

We have, as Ryan notes in his aborted interview, a crime problem. We also have a gun violence problem, involving issues like suicide with firearms, and a horrible rate of children being killed and injured by firearms, including from simple negligence.

 What Ryan doesn't mention in his assertion about enforcement is that the policies of Romney, Ryan and the right would gut support for law enforcement, break law enforcement unions, and make our gun laws more lax instead of having broader, better, more restrictive gun laws and better law enforcement. What is not mentioned here and what appears NOT to be understood by the right is that early childhood education, including free public programming like Sesame Street, IS the best way to eradicated a crime problem and at the same time to best prepare this country for our national defense.

 An excerpt from Politico, from  former Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton and  former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Hugh Shelton: While Americans have always been willing to serve, too many of the young people we need for military service today are inadequately prepared because they lack a high school diploma or because they are in poor physical shape or have a criminal record. In fact, over 72 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds do not meet the basic educational, physical and moral standards required for service. As the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of the Navy, respectively, we find this situation troubling. The United States military has put in place rigorous standards because we need competent, healthy and educated individuals to staff the world’s most professional and technologically advanced military. A limited recruitment pool will restrict our military readiness and erode our national security in the long run. What can we do now to ensure that this trend is not the wave of the future? The most important long-term investment we can make for a strong military is in the health and education of the American people. If we want to ensure that we have a strong, capable fighting force, we need to help America’s youth succeed academically, graduate from high school and obey the law. The most reliable way to achieve these goals is by providing at-risk children with quality early childhood education. Over a period of 40 years, researchers studied children who attended a high-quality Michigan preschool as well as similar children who did not attend. What they found speaks volumes about the benefits of an early introduction to learning. Compared with those who did not attend, the at-risk children enrolled in the program were 44 percent more likely to graduate from high school and half as likely to be arrested for a violent crime by age 40. Research also shows that children who miss out on early education are more likely to drop out of school, become dependent on welfare and abuse illegal drugs. Early education is a proven solution to help more Americans achieve academic success and work toward productive citizenship and employment. Increasing support for early childhood education will also create a strong military and a stronger America. That is why we have joined with other retired military leaders in a nonprofit organization called Mission: Readiness to launch a new effort to address the needs of our armed services in the 21st century. Our recommendation to the new Congress and administration is to make the needed investment in early childhood education to ensure that more young people are ready for a role in the military — should they choose to pursue one. There are many proposals to increase early education investments, including President-elect Barack Obama’s pledge to increase spending for early education by $10 billion to promote the success of America’s students. Congress should make this a priority as it prepares an economic recovery plan to ensure our long-term economic security and the vitality of our work force. The United States military must be ready to protect the American people and our allies from the emerging threats of the 21st century. We must commit to high-quality early childhood education at home to protect our national security and continue the tradition of American military strength.

Ryan, Romney, and the entire right wing that promotes the failed gun culture has a failed set of priorities and a failure to understand what we need in this country. Instead of investing in better education and better social support networks that allow people on the margins of society to improve themselves by having access to food, shelter, and medical care as well as QUALITY education, they are trying to use government for profiting the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about back in 1961, in his farewell address.



 Eisenhower was a successful leader, as our top general during WW II; he was a successful leader addressing military conflicts, including ending the Korean war.  No one can assert that 'Ike' was 'anti-military'.  It was moderate conservative Eisenhower who created the Department of Health Education and Welfare; it is extremist conservatives who want to end it --- but promote more guns, and more military spending on things, not on people.

Whether government guns or private guns, whether using the guns or butter macroeconomic model, or just plain common sense, the right is wrong, and has been going more and more wrong the more they have been going more and more extreme to the right.

We do not need more guns; we need more AND better gun laws, because we DO have a gun problem in this country.  We also have a crime problem in this country, which requires more, not less, support for the public sector that employs police, that funds our courts, and for teachers and nurses and firefighters.

We need to identify the real problems, including the root problems of global warming, increasing pressures on our food supply as we experience increasing drought, and on the dangers of flood and fire, as we are only beginning to see from the increasing problems with wildfires in this country.  We are at serious risk of deforestation, again, due to drought, as well.  We could be facing another dust bowl crisis at our current rate.

The right, in its denial of our actual problems, in favor of putting even more money into the fossil fuel industry already rich pockets, wants to promote all the wrong things, the wrong solutions, the wrong ideas, failed economics and failed social and foreign policy.

The interview above with Ryan is just one example of how they do NOT have good answers to our questions OR our problems.