What This Election Should Be About

I think I told you about one of my favorite political cartoons from Tom Toles. It's somewhat dated, but only in the sense that the chickens have already come home to roost:

First panel: India, where people are sitting in cubicles designing software
Second panel: China, where people are in a factory manufacturing cars
Third panel: US, where a really fat guy is sitting before a bank loan officer saying, "I want refinance my mortgage so I can buy more stuff."

Now this:

The Iraq war, says economist Joseph Stiglitz, is “the first U.S. war financed entirely on credit.” When the war started, the Bush administration said it would cost no more than $60 billion. But the U.S. budget was already in deficit, so the administration had to borrow money to finance the invasion. About 40 percent of the money was borrowed from China and other international investors—the first time since the Revolutionary War that foreigners financed a U.S. war.

At the same time, the administration and Congress lowered taxes instead of raising them, as is customary in wartime The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low, which encouraged middle-class Americans to go on a consumption binge financed by credit cards and home-equity loans. Today, say Stiglitz and other economists, the bills for the country’s spending spree are starting to come due, in the form of higher prices, a weakened dollar, and lower living standards. “There’s no such thing as a free war,” Stiglitz said. “The U.S.—and the world—will be paying the price for decades to come.”

I've often said that the entire Republican orthodoxy has led us to a point in time where they want to reduce taxes to zero and borrow the entire cost of running the government -- from China. If we can hire private contractors to do it (e.g., Newt's proposal to hand it over to Fedex) so much the better -- then shareholders (the elites of The Ownership Society) will finally call all the shots. Never mind "one person, one vote." In The Ownership Society, it's "ten thousand dollars, ten thouand votes.

That's what I think this election should be about.