Ian Williams: Republicans trying to shrink US government
Press TV has conducted an interview with Ian Williams, with the Foreign Policy in Focus from New York, to ask for his insight on a recent report by the US Treasury Department that the government has posted a budget deficit of nearly 150 billion dollars in July.
Following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: What exactly should we blame for the continuing economic issues in the United States?
Williams: In macroeconomic terms it means that instead of the government taking taxes of rich people, it is selling them treasury bonds and getting the money back and paying them interest on it. So it’s not as devastating as the various parties might say one way or the other, and as you saw, a lot of this particular month deficit is because of the sort of trick of the calendar that suddenly a month benefits were paid out early and appear in this month instead of next month. So it’s not that devastating, but the government is running into deficit and one of the reasons for that is that the Republicans and the neo-liberals are trying to shrink government. They do not want the government spending money on anything except weapons and spying and corporate welfare. So they have been squeezing all sorts of programs, where the government played a positive role in people’s lives and at the same time they have to justify this, they have been refusing to levy taxes on people who should be paying. The tax rate now is far lower for rich people than it was at the time of Reagan, for example, or even Nixon. And they want to keep it that way, and the fanaticism in some American economists about shrinking government, and basically they want to strangle government, they want to make sure the government doesn’t get the money and it runs at the deficit all of the time.
Press TV: How devastating this tactic of strangling government is for the American economy?
Williams: I think it is devastating in the long run because, for example, over the recent recession Obama did … what he should have been doing much more openly and prominently, which was spending. That is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in depression. He spent. He borrowed money and spent it on public works, on roads. American infrastructure is trembling and declining; roads, bridges, railways, air traffic control. It’s awful... Because of these ideological, almost theological, constraints against government spending on anything, they are not being replenished and that is the aim these people want to shrink government. They don’t want to see the government doing these things. They want the government wiped out of everything apart from policing…
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