Scapegoat Wanted

American Scofflaw

One more time and take notes as there will be a quiz next period.

The root cause of the economic crisis is NOT the debt, but the repayment.

At a time when our nation was deeply in debt, President Bush and the US Congress passed laws giving tax breaks to large corporations to make it easier, even attractive, to move high-paying manufacturing jobs to other countries. And, for a time, it looked like a food idea. Having cut labor costs, corporations were more profitable. Then as more corporations jumped onto the offshoring band wagon, more and more American workers suddenly found that their $80,000 a year job was gone and only $50,000 a year jobs were available. Mortgage and credit card payments started being missed. Mortgage-backed securities, once a great investment when real-estate prices were skyrocketing, began to fall apart as more and more homes went into foreclosure and drove housing prices back down.

Now the government, especially as an election looms, wants to find a scapegoat to blame, but the truth is that near-sighted government policy created this mess; the same near-sightedness that has led President Bush to scrap programs to help small businesses even as the large Wall Street corporations gorge themselves on $700 billion of our tax dollars.