I am once again asking you to drop the taxpayer framing. Previously.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Party for Socialism and Liberation
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The Party for Socialism and Liberation believes that the only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society. Driven by an insatiable appetite for ever greater profits regardless of social cost, capitalism is on a collision course with the people of the world and the planet itself. Imperialist war; deepening unemployment and poverty; deteriorating health care, housing and education; racism; discrimination and violence based on gender and sexual orientation; environmental destruction—all are inevitable products of the capitalist system itself.
For the great majority of people in the world, including tens of millions of workers in the United States, conditions of life and work are worsening. There is no prospect that this situation can or will be turned around under the existing system.
The idea that the capitalists’ grip on society and their increasingly repressive state can be abolished through any means other than a revolutionary overturn is an illusion. Equally unrealistic are reformist hopes for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism, or solutions based on economic decentralization or small group autonomy. Meeting the needs of the more than 6.5 billion people who inhabit the planet today is impossible without large-scale agriculture and industry and economic planning.
The fundamental problems confronting humanity today flow from the reality that most of the world’s productive wealth—the product of socialized labor and nature—is privately owned and controlled by a tiny minority. This minority decides what will be produced and what will not. Its decisions are based on making profits rather than meeting human needs.
There are really only two choices for humanity today—an increasingly destructive capitalism, or socialism.
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It's not technically accurate, but I don't think it's necessary to include a crash course on MMT every time you are making a post agitating against imperialism. In fact, I think it's counterproductive.
You don’t have to give a lesson in MMT, you simply don’t mislabel federal spending as taxpayer money.
Why? As I said:
Firstly because it just factually isn’t, but more importantly because that false framing serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. One of its more subtle sins is that it leaves the impression that those who pay federal income taxes ought to have more say than those who don’t, and that the more one pays the more say one ought to have. But just in general, this framing is foundational to the bourgeois project of obfuscating how fiat money actually works. For instance, we’re not supposed to understand the intentionally complicated, obfuscatory nonsense that the government must sell treasuries to the bourgeoisie in order to fund itself. The government doesn’t need that money at all, and all that really does is give the wealthy a safe place to park their capital with interest, temporarily removing it from the productive economy.
What are you talking about? Spending trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in a span of a single generation on something other than killing brown people, on anything else really, is a pretty good framing to me.
The issue isn’t what the US spent money on. The issue is specifically that De la Cruz framed it as “taxpayer” money, which it wasn’t, because US federal taxes pay for literally nothing. Previously.
The issue isn’t what the US spent money on
federal taxes pay for literally nothing
That is the issue, they paid for bombs and planes and tanks and drones and camps and guns... I'd rather they have paid for houses, trains or parks. And I feel like most people would agree with this framing.
You can't just deny the entire reality as a basis of your argument. Which is, to clarify, money spent on war on terror could not and should not have been spent better?
I’m not denying any of what the federal government spent money on, and that’s all great stuff for agitation. She definitely should do that. I’m simply saying that federal spending doesn’t come from taxes, and we oughtn’t perpetuate a falsehood that serves bourgeois austerity narratives.
The point is that federal spending is not funded by taxes in any capacity. It's more accurate to imagine the IRS dumping every dollar they collect into a black hole, and every dollar that gets spent by the federal government as coming out of an interdimensional portal.
flat earther economics
Indeed, the hegemonic neoclassical/neoliberal economics is flat earth economics. Or as Marxist economist Michael Hudson calls it, Junk Economics.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3:
Link 4:
What's the source for the 4.5 million figure? It's believable -- I've seen sourcing on numbers running into the millions -- but it's large enough that we shouldn't expect to toss it out there without immediately being asked for the basis.
Perhaps from Brown University’s Costs of War Project report (PDF).
Responsible Statecraft: The War on Terror led to over 4.5 million deaths: report