In the midst of the debate in the House of Representatives about the tax legislation that Barack Obama and the Republican party are collaborating on, Congressman Todd Akin has come forward with a proposal for how the American economy can be turned around: 49.2 million Americans should stop eating food.
In a speech on Capitol Hill yesterday, Representative Akin’s said that the government should provide “no more food stamps”. Right now, 16 percent of the U.S. population depends upon food stamps to avoid starvation.
Congressman Akin said that programs to provide food to these people “are not essential”. What does Akin think is essential, if making sure that 42.9 Americans have food to eat is not?
Todd Akin thinks that giving tax cuts to billionaires is essential. He spoke at great length yesterday about the suffering of billionaires, who he described as “these supposedly rich people”.
Akin suggests that, if only tax cuts were given to billionaires, 42.9 million Americans would somehow find enough to eat without using the food stamps they currently depend upon. What Akin didn’t mention in his speech is that billionaires already have those tax cuts, and have had them for almost 10 years.
If tax cuts to billionaires will provide food for everybody, then how come 42.9 million Americans are on food stamps? Why are tens of millions of Americans looking for work, and not able to find any jobs, when the billionaires already have their tax cuts?
The billionaires aren’t sharing their money. That’s why. They’re hoarding it. They’re using it to buy personal jets they can use to take foreign vacations. They’re investing it in sweatshop factories overseas.
The billionaires that Todd Akin calls “these supposedly rich people” are not using tax cuts to give us jobs. They’re not using tax cuts to enable Americans to buy food.
Todd Akin’s plan for economic recovery seems to be to starve the unemployed out of existence. They can’t be counted as looking for work, after all, after they’re dead.
Todd Akin is the Marie Antoinette of our times. He looks at the one out of every eight Americans who will starve without food stamps, and proclaims, Let them eat tax cuts.
Oh this is just so bad. Why is it okay to give fraudulent banksters TRILLIONS for their bad gambling debts, and TRILLIONS to fight meaningless (unless you’re an oil company) wars but NOT okay to feed your citizenry during a depression? WTF?!
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his conclusion: Alas, we humans are very good at solving the problem of how can we organize matter in such a way that we maximize the current flow of energy to support our desires for stuff. We are a clever species. In fact, if I had my say we would be called Homo calidus, man the clever, instead of Homo sapiens, man the wise. Collectively and individually I don’t think we are very wise at all. Wise thinking is strategic, that is long-term and wide area, thinking. It is systemic thinking. And it is moral thinking — what is the best for the greatest number? Very few of we humans display this kind of thinking. And those that do are so vastly outnumbered by those who can’t even comprehend what that means that their voices are drowned out by the clamor for lower taxes and higher pay by the masses.
This is why, in the end, I am a pessimist when it comes to ideas like Jackson’s thoughts about a transition to a sustainable economy that provides the capacity to flourish. Don’t get me wrong. I think there will be such a transition, but only after a major and probably very painful calamity and only if the wiser voices succeed in surviving and positioning themselves to have more influence in some future time. Big ifs probably.