A Redistributive State For The Wealthy

“We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices — the hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on foreign oil, “foreign” representing those nations, Arab and Chinese, that lend us the money to pay for our wars.

And while we’ve all heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our military spending, this is always portrayed as either “corruption” or simple inefficiency, and not what it really is — a profound expression of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary, struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.”

— Matt Taibbi in Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics

See Also: Why the Last 37 Years Were an Economic Illusion, Radical Leftists Are Keeping Gas Prices High, “America Must Not Act Rashly over Inflation“, and Bridging the Poverty Gap, Part One.

[tags]economics, american economy, redistributive state, progressive policies, matt taibbi[/tags]