So what’s another $1 trillion as long as it’s for a good cause?
Apparently not much according to Woody Tasch, the chairman of Investors’ Circle, a company that describes itself as a “community of for-profit social entrepreneurs.”
Tasch called for $1 trillion taxpayers’ dollars to “invest” “in a new American Dream.” His socialist call for spending on clean energy, sustainable food and other liberal causes ran in The Christian Science Monitor on November 15.
“Economists project that the cost of the war in
But Tasch didn’t advertise the huge cost of his plan. Every American – man, woman and child – would have to pay nearly $3,300 each over the next five years, but with the United States’ progressive tax system, at least half the burden would be place on the wealthiest five percent, who already pay almost 60 percent of the federal income tax revenues according to the National Taxpayers Union.
Tasch’s proposal would come out to $200 billion annually [$1 trillion in five years] – roughly 1.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Such an expansion of government spending would be enough to gobble up almost half of the U.S. GDP annual expansion, growing at a rate of 3.2 percent.
According to Tasch, the trillion dollar boondoggle would include:
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$250 billion for clean energy and energy efficiency;
$250 billion for carbon sequestration and bioremediation;
$250 billion for sustainable food and forests; and
$250 billion for community development.
“The financial returns of the 20th century depended upon environmental and social trends that are unsustainable. The old worldviews and economic institutions are no longer adequate. We must begin to move, and move boldly, in a new direction,” wrote Tasch sounding eerily familiar to the last line of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”:
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
