The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

EDITORIAL
Let the Capitalists Pay the Government Debt

Mar 4, 2013

On March 1, the federal government imposed 85 billion dollars more in spending cuts over the next seven months. This was supposed to be because of some fake deadline, called the sequester, that the Republicans and Democrats supposedly couldn’t meet.

For more than two years, the politicians have pushed this crap. They set one fake deadline after another. First it was the debt ceiling. Then it was the fiscal cliff. Each time, the Democrats and Republicans blamed each other. They shed crocodile tears.

Most of all, they lied through their teeth.

Together, the Democrats and Republicans increased our taxes, while slashing more than two trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years. They cut thousands of programs and services that reach every person in the country through education, health care, infrastructure maintenance and construction, environmental protection, as well as workplace, food and drug safety, to name just a few.

They targeted the working class and poor. Now, with the latest cuts, they are slashing benefits for the long-term unemployed and the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers and other employees. In the coming months, they are threatening furloughs to cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

Both parties are using the threat of even more cuts in domestic spending to set the stage for their biggest assault of all: Social Security and Medicare benefits. These programs are huge sources of money, the biggest ones left. And the politicians of both parties have made it clear that they intend on targeting them for cuts.

Don’t believe all the lies about how the politicians want to reduce the national debt. Yes, the national debt is huge. At close to 17 trillion dollars, it is almost as big as the debt of all the other governments in the world combined!

But that debt was taken on by the politicians coming to the aid and support of the biggest capitalist class in the world that has sucked the wealth from the biggest and richest companies and banks in the world.

The government spent trillions bailing out the banks, auto companies and other big companies. It spent trillions more cutting corporate taxes. Today many of the biggest companies and banks pay little or no federal taxes, and many even get billions of dollars in tax rebates. And finally, the government burnt up trillions of dollars in two big wars, as well as all the other wars on every continent in the world that they have fueled–all for the profits of the oil companies, weapons makers and banks.

Both parties expect the working population to pay the humongous bill. All those budget cuts and tax increases are merely being used to funnel even more money from the working population into the pockets of the big corporations.

There is no reason we should. The big companies and the wealthy created the debt. So, let them pay for it.

Working people have to put our needs first. We need more jobs, decent pay, health care, retirement, schools, government services. Our work has created more than enough wealth for that and much more.

Of course, to get those things will take a fight, a big fight against not just the politicians, but the capitalist class that they serve. That may sound hard. But if workers let the capitalists and the politicians continue to do what they have already done, they will take everything from us.

The only alternative is to fight–and that opens up the possibility that workers can win and change everything.