"Deficit" as a Code Word of the Wealthy

According to reports, the primary concern of the G 20 conference in Toronto was the level of global debt. Most of the proposals were for a new round of austerity to reduce this deficit. Many counties, e.g. Germany wanted to attack this problem before it gets any worse. Obama wanted to go slower so that his stimulus program, (Another word for borrowing on the international financial market.) would have more time to take effect.

The thing that struck me was that the only solution considered was reducing cost, i.e. austerity, not increasing revenue. Reducing costs affects the mass of the world's population. Increasing revenue, if done fairly, would affect the much fewer rich. It should be remembered that the G 20 confab represents the interests of the global moneyed class, not the majority of citizens of the attending countries. In effect, the G-20, by its austerity pitch betrays its money, not people, roots. The popular press would have us believe that it is dealing with the world economy and its necessities.

I went to the World Social Forum's web site to see if this needed focus on the wealthy was in evidence. As far as I can see it was not. There was an abundance of sentiment about bettering the lives of the poor, about the evils of global capitalism, but I could find no specific proposals on redistribution of wealth and mechanisms for achieving this. I have visited various progressive web sites such as Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). I could find no proposals for redistribution of the world's wealth and mechanism's for achieving it and for maintaining an equitable distribution. Yet it is clear that the current mechanism for wealth generation and ownership are central to the world's economic problems.

It is not that the policy and mechanisms are unknown. For example James Tobin, a now deceased professor of economics, proposed what has been called the Tobin Tax. This is a very small, less than 1%, tax on global currency speculation transactions. This market processes over $1.8 trillion dollars daily. Tobin was concerned with transferring wealth from the rich portions of this planet to the poorest. He estimated a transaction tax, analogous to a sales tax, on this market, a market primarily of the rich, would generate about 300 billion a year, which was about what the United Nations said was necessary to achieve their goal of stamping out the abject poverty experienced by billions of people and providing a basic education for children.

It is high time progressives made the redistribution of wealth a prominent, well-articulated, political objective. Far from being the basis of unfairness that the political Right likes to paint such an effort, it is the prerequisite for creating a reasonably fair, healthy, democratic society. Excessively concentrated wealth must be seen as a fundamental enemy of democracy and human well being.

Bob Newhard