Today, Steve Benen has published a lovely graph which depicts the beginning of the destruction of one of the Republicans’ favorite idols, the Laffer Curve, as a universal panacea:
Naturally, an argument can be made that an initial blip of bigger deficits will occur, before the magic of the Laffer Curve brings in the riches to the government coffers – but I doubt that’s going to occur, especially given the nature of the tax cut on corporations which is causing these initial deficit increases.
But I would argue that this also illustrative of the basic struggle between the philosophy that greed is good, aka libertarianism, vs collective actions. The activities of the first two years of the Trump Presidency have been little more than unrestrained giveaways to the corporate world, both in terms of corporate tax reductions and in reductions for corporate C-suite personnel, aka the elite, and the corporate world is about the use of greed to accomplish societal goals – a generally successful venture, but one requiring monitoring as it tends to get out of control. In this case, it appears the fox is guarding the hen house.
This unfettered pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige, so reminiscent of the degenerative, and disastrous, phase of the secular demographic cycle discussed in Secular Cycles (Turchin), is the driving force behind the current trend on the graph, above. I do not mean to tar all of the private sector with the brush of all-consuming greed, but the immense financial power of the big companies, when used with greed rather than service at heart, has the power to cause immense damage.
It turns out the descriptive Too Big To Fail, a perennially popular phrase, is profoundly wrong. Too Big To Exist is a far better encapsulation of the dangers of such large, powerful entities – and the further dangers when they are run by greedy and ambitious characters. It also suggests that something needs to be done to eliminate such entities from our society, preferably through monopoly-busting and the like. This may turn out to be one of Obama’s biggest failures.
The up & coming question may be When will our national debt begin to affect our economy in a deleterious manner?
