By Gerry Scoppettuolo
Once you start a fire you don’t know where it will go
Every penny that doesn’t go into a pay check is a penny stolen from a worker
-Big Bill Haywood, IWW union organizer, 1912
There is a universally acknowledged bond crisis facing the United States that is dangerously close to exploding and with it the annual federal budget. This crisis threatens all government spending and would hurt the working class the most. The status of the fiscal 2027 budget (which funds all government purchases between Oct. 1, 2026 through Sept. 30, 2027) remains much in doubt and the working class, worried by inflation, is in the cross hairs.
Anticipating a crisis, the U.S. Senate last week put off the budget deadline into December by means of extending the current continuing budget resolution. A continuing budget resolution is enacted by Congress when both parties cannot agree to a budget by the time it is due and then kicks the can down the road. During these periods, the last enacted budget continues, remaining the same (except for Agriculture, Military Construction and Legislative needs). The current budget already gives a 5% cut to Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation, housing subsidies and other human needs because of inflation during these band-aid situations. This is when the working class gets kicked down the road.
The federal budget requires huge monetary outlays and dangerous decisions are now being made by the bourgeoisie. As but one example, life-sustaining HIV medications require subsidies for 300,000 of the poorest of the 1.2 million living with the disease in this country. Without their meds, they will die. The current continuing resolution calls for zero dollars. Meanwhile tens of thousands are newly infected every year and prevalence is always increasing.
This is one estimate of the thousands of others that could be calculated for other programs and is only one part of a near unsolvable budget crisis in the U.S. The current budget proposal calls for a $185 billion tax cut for those earning over $500,000/yr (Joint Committee on Taxation). When combined with the $450 billion proposed increase in the defense budget, the special Iran War request of $67 billion, and the $99.5 billion for ICE this amounts to $802 billion in new funds that have to come from somewhere.
Living with an under-funded budget is one thing. Living with no budget at all is not a possibility. How will the AIPAC bought-and-sold Congress and other PAC contributors come up with this money? $802 billion in new funds can only come from selling U.S. Treasury bonds on the global market. But potential purchasers are realists, skeptical and are increasingly demanding higher returns on the bonds that they buy. We know this because, when the Treasury conducts bond auctions several times a week, buyers demand ever-increasing interest rates. Buyers must be enticed to keep buying and the interest rate they demand (called the yield) must be correspondingly increased by the U.S. Treasury in order to make the sale.
All of this causes more debt of course. One solution to this problem would be to level huge taxes on the rich and nationalize their factories and railroads, and confiscate their palaces and yachts. It should not be forgotten that so-called profit (referred to by Marx as surplus value) is really just the dollar value of everything that the working class produces beyond the cost in wages to provide a decent standard of living. Centuries of wage theft since feudalism and the industrial revolution are stages, and change over time. History is a developing, open-ended process and an historical materialist analysis is a guide to our future.
The future is something the working class makes.
