Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
If you had the opportunity to save a million people from preventable death, would you do it? … This is not merely a rhetorical question, but one that… - Mark Weisbrot
" "If you had the opportunity to save a million people from preventable death, would you do it? … This is not merely a rhetorical question, but one that members of the Congress will have to answer in the present. … Right now, legislation has already passed the House of Representatives that would do just that. And it was included in the newly released COVID relief bill that is being negotiated between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It would require the Treasury Department, which represents our government at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to support a multi-trillion dollar relief package from the Fund. These funds are not loans and therefore will not have to be repaid. They have no conditions attached to them. And they do not cost the U.S. government anything at all — not now, and not at any time in the future.
English
Collect this quote
About Mark Weisbrot
Mark Alan Weisbrot is an American economist and columnist. He is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Mark Weisbrot
The American right has always hated social security, from its origin in the New Deal of the 1930s. Social security is based on an ethic of solidarity: we are all in this together, so it is in our collective and individual interest to pay into a social insurance fund when we are young, healthy and working, and draw upon it when we need it. This does not fit well with the rightwing narrative of society as a collection of atomized, self-interested individuals. In the 90s... many liberals began to accept, and even promote, the arithmetically false, rightwing talking points that social security was going broke. The verbal and accounting tricks were swallowed by much of the media and proved effective... Hardly anyone, outside of those of us who looked at the numbers, seemed to notice that this is just one side of the balance sheet. The other side shows that productivity and wages also grow, and hence it takes fewer workers per retiree to finance any given level of benefits. That’s one reason why, for example, the ratio of workers to retirees fell from 8.6 in 1955 to 3.3 in 1999 and nobody missed a social security check. And people accepted that payroll taxes increased, because their wages increased vastly more. The “granny-bashers”, as we affectionately called them, created a phony intergenerational war out of something that was very much a war waged by the rich against all generations
All of this is illegal under numerous treaties that the U.S. has signed, including the charter of the United Nations, the charter of the Organization of American States, and other international law and conventions. To legitimize this brutality, which has likely already killed thousands of Venezuelans by reducing access to life-saving goods and services, the Trump administration has presented the sanctions as a consensus of the “international community”—similar to what George W. Bush did when he put together a “coalition of the willing” of 48 countries to support his disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Loading...