Two big money stories are washing over us today. First, the bond markets of the U.S., Japan, and the leading European nations are seeing their yields soar, which will likely compel their governments to raise interest rates. For fans of housing unaffordability, student loan defaults, and car repossessions, it’s a grand and glorious day.
Second, The New York Times reports that through the medium of super PACs, roughly $1 billion in untraceable and anonymous money has already been deployed to support or oppose candidates and causes in this year’s midterm elections. For fans of government of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs, it’s a grand and glorious day, too.
The proximate cause of that first story is the rise of government debt in the major capitalist economies, and most particularly in the most major capitalist economy—ours. President Trump has been largely indifferent to this traditional conservative concern, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations while backing mammoth spending on the Pentagon. With the assistance of the Republicans in Congress, he’s also engineered cutbacks on food stamps and Medicaid, but these cuts, despite their cruelty, haven’t even begun to offset the debt-ballooning consequences of his tax reductions to rich folks like, well, himself.
Opinion editors and columnists who work for those rich folks have now reverted to that hardy perennial of right-wing economics: slashing spending on Social Security and Medicare. Last week, The Washington Post’s opinion editors, who were hired to meet Post owner Jeff Bezos’s demand that the paper’s opinion pages solely feature laissez-faire views on economic issues, ran an editorial with the headline “To Get the National Debt Under Control, Start With the Retirement State.” Americans who live in “the retirement state”—more commonly known as seniors, or the elderly—would see their benefits reduced if they failed to meet some criteria the Post editorialists generously proffered.
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Post editors somehow neglected to note that another way to get the national debt under control might be to raise Jeff Bezos’s taxes, along with those of his fellow billionaires and some centimillionaires as well. Given the effect that rising national debts are having on interest rates and affordability, Americans need policies that will slow or stop that rise that don’t primarily come at a cost to their own well-being. By far the best way to do that—to be serious about fiscal responsibility—would be to impose a wealth tax on Bezos and his ilk. As a side benefit, that could also reduce the ability of that ilk to purchase elections, thereby addressing both of the problems dominating today’s headlines. A twofer for all of us (well, not Bezos).
