I call it the astrological theory of public finance. Every time the earth makes a trip around the sun, the numbers on one side of a set of books are supposed to equal those on the other.
At 19:49 5/12/2007, you wrote:
On Dec 5, 2007 7:55 AM, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is not a left perspective, but a perspective about "the" economy > that is being propagandized to the millions. Why does AOL corporation > want people to feel that there is a national debt ? So that they will > accept privatizing social security ? Why is the monopoly media putting > out this perspective that you say expertly is misleading ? This money > 75% of which is owed to the real "People" , why is it portrayed as a > "crisis" , not on PEN-L, but in the major media. ? A very good question. Why is the media obsessing so much about the "national debt"? It is not a left perspective, neither is it a right perspective. Dick Cheney is on record as saying "deficits don't matter". They have learned to use debt to enrich the military-indistrial-academic complex. I think the real reason is a kind of mass-OCD. It is like how someone may feel if the refrigerator door is left open for too long. When there is so much debt, it shows that something is "out of balance". The natural state of all things is a balance, equilibrium. Anything that is out of balance is bound to return to balance sooner or later. Any force that maintains the imbalance is an unnatural one, even evil. Of course the problem is with our distorted notion of budget balance that comes from an arbitrary accounting standard. On the other hand this notion of equilibrium seems to be deep rooted in our cultural psyche (comes from the Greeks?). We can try to understand it better. I don't think we can really change it. -raghu.
