The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives.
But the austerity game also has winners. Cutting or eliminating government programs that benefit the less advantaged has long been an ideological goal of conservatives. Doing so also generates a tidy windfall for the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.
U.S. financial interests that stand to gain from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cutbacks "have been the core of the big con," the "propaganda," that those programs are in crisis and must be slashed, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas.
Advocates of austerity measures have sold their proposals as a means to improve the economy.
"It is an error to think that fiscal austerity is a threat to growth and job creation," declared European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in July 2010.Read it at The Huffington Post
Austerity's Big Winners Prove To Be Wall Street And The Wealthy
by Zach Carter
1 comment:
As I have been writing for some time now, austerity (dramatic shrinking of government spending) really equates to massive tax increases on the poor and middle class. They are being taxed to death and that confiscated wealth is being given to the rich, literaly handed over to them on a silver platter, even as the rich whine about having to pay more (which they're not).
It's a cruel reality. The poor and middle class are being summarily stripped of their last bits wealth and it's all being given to the rich.
Meanwhile, those same poor and middle class, whose very work built and continue to maintain this country, are being called lazy, losers, complainers, parasites and what's eve more unbelievable is that they are agreeing with this characterization thanks to the brilliant and cynical manipulation of information by the media and those in power.
The ranks of the lower classes have been divided, making it easy for the wealthy elites to subjugate them. There is pretty much zero resistance, just some ragtag protesters with makeshift paper signs and placards.
The joke's on us, people.
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