Dr. Forbush Thinks

George W Bush performed an unethical experiment on the economics of the American people and the result is that they made themselves wealthier at the expense of the middle class.

In medicine we have the Hippocratic oath. We also have the wisdom of “…at first doing no harm.” It is certainly forbidden to experiment on people who are unaware of the experimentation. With medicine or treatments a patient is asked to agree to the procedure. What other ethical choice is there? After all, if you don’t have your health what do you have? Is there such a thing as well being for a person who has had there life destroyed by someone they trusted?

In economics things are different. Each government takes the wheel at the helm of the economy and they try to steer it where they please. But, as we all know the economic ship behaves differently in different waters. If the ship enters troubled waters, not one but many people suffer at what can only be called experimentation. But the people effected by this experimentation are never asked to agree to the terms. The people controlling the wheel may even benefit themselves to the detriment of the majority on the ship.

Regardless of the ethics and morality of experimentation on our economic well being, the Bush administration has done just that. They have acted in ways contrary to classic economic thinking in an effort to make themselves wealthier at the expense of the rest of us.

In 2001 when George W Bush took office the stock market bubble began to burst and we entered an economic recession. This is normal and part of the natural feedback system we have in the business cycle. The simplified version of which begins with the production of products. The idea is to produce enough products for the demand. However, the demand and production are never kept in complete harmony. Therefore, the price of the product is effected by both the supply and demand for the product. High demand and low production results in a scarce expensive product. Similarly low demand and high production results in a cheap abundant product. The oscillation in prices for a product results from the response to wanting more production and spending cash from a scarce expensive product to increase production to the point that the product becomes cheap and abundant. Production then becomes unused and then sold off resulting in lower production again. If “need” continues to change over time it confounds the situation, making planning difficult and business cycles even more extreme.

Normally, once people understand the direction of the market simple human greed will pull everyone in the proper direction to respond to the markets. However, since governments are very large they can effect these decisions by altering the reward for acting in the market favorable way. They do this mainly by taxation and fees. People can be persuaded to invest in certain businesses if taxation is different for different industries or activities. Businesses can be persuaded to act in certain ways if one way is more favorable in some way. But, it isn’t always clear how changing these things will effect the overall economy.

So, when George W Bush responded to the recession by cutting taxes on the wealthy he assumed that this was going to be a good thing for all Americans. He claimed that giving more money the wealthy would result in more investment and spending, which would hypothetically spur the economy. But, since no one had ever done this in time of war, and borrowed money to pay for this reward to the wealthy Americans became the subject of a massive medical experiment.

The results are beginning to come in from this experiment. First of all the recovery is much slower than the recovery under the Clinton administration. In fact, the recovery is much slower that any recession since World War II. The data from this experiment suggests that the natural recovery is happening in spite of giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Second, giving tax breaks to the wealthy has resulted in a higher degree of separation being the rich and the poor. In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. In fact, the middle class is getting poorer as well.

The conclusion is that the Bush administration performed an unethical experiment on the economics of the American people and the result is that they made themselves wealthier at the expense of the middle class.



-----------------------------------------------------





Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics