Why Entitlements Should be Spared.

Let’s forget about the fact that programs like Medicare and Social Security are smart investments, good for people, good for the economy, good for social stability.   Why should these investments — called entitlements — be cut to compensate for a deficit caused by decades of deliberate under funding of government?

It is being said more and more often — and for good reason — we are in a class war.  Plain and simple.  The attack, however, does not come from the needy, resentful left, as conservatives want Americans to believe, it comes from a greedy, myopic right.

Conservatives have gone after government with particular focus and vengeance since the early 1980s.  And they are succeeding.  Today’s conservatives still try to divide us on social issues, but they succeed on economic ones.

We couldn’t even maintain a budget surplus in the post-Clinton years.  We cut and squandered our national treasury.  Then we pushed forward with poorly-conceived tax policy based on failed economic opinions.  The Tweedledum and Tweedledee twins of Republican failure otherwise known as Starve the Beast and Trickle Down Economics.

So when I hear so-called GOP moderates like Representative John Kline whine that entitlements must be cut before Republicans will agree to any deficit plan in the next few weeks, one has to think twice.  Do we really need to cut programs that should be held harmless or is the GOP plan to gut government working?  I will argue that it is the latter.

Entitlements should be spared because they are a social investment, paid for by taxpayers, that are targets of cuts today because the GOP is winning the class war, and not because cuts will strengthen our economic future.  Better management — appropriate and responsible funding — should spare these programs from the Orwellian politics of less-is-more crowd.

The slippery slope is becoming steeper.  Fast.  Time to dig in the heels and hope it isn’t too late.

Related articles

• The Fiscal Cliff Deal Could Destroy Medicare (businessinsider.com)
• Starve the beast:  Fiscal calamity in the GOP’s Plan to shrink government (post-gazette.com)
• Appetite for cutting entitlements not just a Republican thing (tv.msnbc.com)
• The new conservative purity test (salon.com)
• Cliff Deal Spares Retirees — for Now (blogs.marketwatch.com)
• Obama’s Great Society (salon.com)
• 2016 politics already on display (kypost.com)
• Chris Christie, Spare Us Your Anti-GOP Theatrics — You’re Still a Republican (alternet.org)
• GOP Rep:  ”It’s About Time” We Had Another Government Shut Down (thinkprogress.org)

The Endangered American Citizen

The Good Citizen's Handbook

You know what is happening here…the American Citizen is being replaced by ideological cliques.  Instead of Americans, we have Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partyers, Libertarians, and more.  These are not classes in an economic or social sense as they once were, but more aligned behind political movements.  So called “class warfare” has taken on a line of absolute party affiliation, one in which people put party before country.  And it is endangering the identity of the American Citizen.

Look at our history.  There is a strong tradition of American community that let our country prevail in difficult times.  We pulled through crisis when we pulled together.  Our very founding is based on compromise and community.  Check out the Federalist Papers, study the debate behind our nation’s founding.  Look at what it took to prevail through previous economic troubles and international conflicts.  We didn’t succeed in past troubles by dividing the country, we found common ground — our common interests — and built upon that.

How does diluting the power of citizenship square with the principles upon which this country was founded?

Today we seem to be entering an era where sides are divided and democracy is being replaced by oligarchy.  Any challenge to this new order comes with uncompromising resistance.  Wealth and opportunity trickles upward and — even worse — it moves easily overseas.  Even our democratically elected officials, especially on the right, are in essence beholden to special interests through monetary support and literal pledges.  Our Supreme Court upholds this bastardizing of citizenship.

The worst offenders are on the right.  They do not support social programs, call taxes a sin, and believe in the thinnest of all government services.  They foster a false belief that Christian principles guide their purpose, but their real god is the free market, with all of its failings and flaws.  Worst of all, they do not have our country’s community spirit.  It is one way — their way — or no way.  How can they have our future’s best interest in mind?

Even today as we face a real and longterm threat to our country’s future, Republicans perpetuate division based on their anti-government views.  In essence, their anti-government views are anti-American, they destroy the American community that served this nation so well.

Democrats, at least, have some feeling for our American Community.  They do offer to compromise, capitulating important principles, in order to get something done.  But it is never enough for Republicans now.  Their myopic and self-righteous view of the new world order gives them no incentive to preserve our heritage.  They prefer to change America, and until that happens, American citizens don’t matter, but Republican principles do.  And so we have a real threat to rights and identity of the American Citizen.

Grand Bargain…

I am not the smartest guy you’ll meet, but I am beginning to think I am smarter than most people in Washington.

Sadly, ignorance and incompetence overwhelms and prevails in Washington today.  The victors are the conservatives, the losers the progressives.

Correcting our budget crisis is not an economic question, it is a political one, and the politicians answering the question are not qualified for the job.

The root of the problem rests in the risks of democracy.  As long as we have a gullible and uninformed majority electing bad people to office, we will have unqualified leadership and inappropriate public policy.  Votes on election day matter as much — maybe more — than votes taking place in Congress now.

Republicans have the bad politics and Democrats cave in to them.  Listen to any Sunday morning news talk show.  The Democrats talk in terms defined by the Republicans.  The Republicans have framed the debate, controlled it, and won it.  We now have a government run by people who see our government only as an oversized, wasteful, and economically unsound bureaucratic mess.  This is a political opinion, not an economic fact.

There are ways to fix this problem.  Again this is an issue with an economic solution, but politics have hijacked the debate.  The biggest Republican lie that Democrats do not stand up to is this idea that the United States does not live within its means.  Perhaps politics has made Democrats weak, but they fail to deliver the simple answer:  We have a funding problem, not a spending problem.  We have obligations, not entitlements.  We need to fund our government with smart and sufficient tax policy and own up to our obligations.  Government is not the problem, how we choose to support it is the problem.

Republicans gave us — some of us more than others — tax cuts we could not afford.  They did this so they could destroy social programs that go against their selfish, short-sighted ideological preferences.  For decades conservatives – conservatives morally superior than many of today’s Republican leaders – tried to divide the United States on social issues, but they respected obligations of government.  Today the self-described patriots have succeeded in dividing us by installing irresponsible fiscal policy and fostering economic lies.

Anti-tax, anti-government policies have not helped this country.  It certainly has not helped most Americans.  These policies haven’t even helped most Republicans who support them.

Just years ago it looked like we would be back in surplus today, but we pushed irresponsible tax cuts and enormous unfunded expenses like our wars.  One can easily argue that anti-government policies set up our financial collapse and that our anti-tax positions left us with no corrective opportunity to move on fiscal policy.

Moreover, supply side economics DID NOT deliver the prosperity conservatives promised.  Even in the best of times, real wages for most Americans remained flat or declined.  Real household debt reached record levels.  And don’t forget this recession.  Did the policies that allowed us to roll up to the economic collapse in 2008 serve us well?

It is time to call a spade a spade.  We have shameful stupidity on Capitol Hill.  Anti-intellectual Republicans are a real threat to this country.  They are rearranging an American social contract that has worked for generations.  The results are disastrous.  Better, smarter people need to lead, but that won’t happen until Americans become smarter and better.  People simply don’t get it and that the real disgrace.

What kind of bargain is this?

Will it be Obama’s Economy in 2012?

It is a McConnell-Cantor-Boehner Economy Stupid

Oten you hear people comment — either with frustration or joy — that in 2012 President Barak Obama won’t be able to say he inherited Bush’s economic mess.  Is that entirely true?  Can it even be true?

Certainly President Obama comes up short when you look at his fiscal solutions.  A stronger stimulus program and now a second stimulus program would be wise and beneficial, but there is nothing like that anywhere on the horizon.  How could there be?

President Obama is up against a political mindset that is decidedly anti-government and perhaps more significantly, anti-Obama.  This mindset governs a political party that would rather inflict further harm on our society than serve our best interests all in the name of an ideological fight.  It is difficult to see how these people can truly believe they have facts on their side.  The facts about our economic situation are out there, but opinions reign supreme when facts don’t square with your ideological goals.

In reality, the conservatives own this economy even more than they did in 2008.  They have done absolutely nothing to work with Democrats.  Nothing.  They deny what success has occurred — the economy did topple a little toward recovery after government intervention — and focus on the destruction they have wrought.

We have our own history and best practices to show how a functional balance between government and business supports a strong economy.  This is a social contract between the people and their government to help manage the best interests of all, not a fortunate few.  Conservatives don’t remember that history, they suggest myths of economic individualism and “objectivism” in its place.  And as these ideas get implanted in our public debate and policy decisions, the results have been disastrous.

Ask again…are we better off today than we were 10 years ago?  20?  30?  50?  Certainly we have benefited from our past success.  Technology is a simple way to show that everyone is a clear winner in the long run.  We take for granted today many things that would have been available only to the very wealthiest individuals, and many more daily goods and services would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.  That is due to economic growth.  But where is our growth today and are we setting ourselves up for a future of ongoing sucess or a future that look more like society today?

As a percentage of GDP we have a lower tax rate than any time in almost 60 years.  The wealthiest individuals and corporations – the “job creators — have more wealth now than any time since 1928…where are the jobs?  Where is the prosperity?  What should give us confidence that more of the conservative economy is going to bring about a better future?

Obama’s economic effots have been hijacked by bad ideas and lies.  Progress is held hostage by a pack of ideologues beholden to people who dress up in a Revolutionary garb.  (If only these people understood the history they claim to honor; an age of secular enlightenment and reason.)

In 2012 this will not be Obama’s economy, this will be the GOP and the Tea Party economy.  Until the Party of No grows up and learns to compromise, there can be no mistake about this.

More GOP Tripe

The Minnesota House Republican Campaign Committee is busy doing what Republicans do best, skewing political positions by misrepresenting the facts.

Today on the StarTribune website they have been running a link pinning the blame for an impending shutdown of Minnesota state government on Governor Mark Dayton.  They suggest that not only can Mark Dayton personally endure a shutdown but that he strategically wants the shutdown.

Perhaps Republicans should worry less about people they think can endure a shutdown and worry more about those who cannot.  Moreover everyone will be worse off if we suffer a government shutdown.  There is no good reason for a responsible person to want a shut down.  The GOP simply does not get it.

Of course a large group of poorly informed or unsophisticated Minnesotans will believe the GOP’s false argument, and too many of them are elected representatives in our government.  That is the diseased core of so much that is turning back the clock on Minnesota’s progress.

Arguing that Mark Dayton wants a government shutdown is a not-so-well-thought-out opinion.  It is Mark Dayton, after all, who has made sincere and real efforts to compromise and negotiate.  The GOP, on the other hand, pouts and digs in, making their agenda a priority over the interests of the state.

Let’s not forget that more Minnesotans back Governor Dayton’s positions compared with the agenda of the GOP.  If Republicans did not want a shutdown, they could respond to the political and fiscal reality we face and work with our governor.  Instead they block progress and blame Governor Dayton.  Typical GOP strategy.

First of all, if you want to blame a governor, the governor who bears the blame is currently running for president.

Tim Pawlenty and his misguided belief that we can get more if we do less left Minnesota starved for resources.  The result of ransacking our public services and underfunding our budget is clear.  In an economic crisis we have no investments to fall back on, no room for adequate cuts.

Pawlenty and the GOP left Minnesota unprepared for fiscal disaster.  To turn around now and blame the current administration for this problem is irresponsible.  It is far worse to do nothing to help fix the problem you created, and this is exactly what the Republicans are doing today.

To think like a Republican you must suspend all understanding of cause-and-effect, you must live in a naive world where what you did yesterday has no bearing on conditions today and likewise where today has no ramifications for tomorrow.  Better people grew out of this kind of immaturity as school children when many of us were taught integrity and responsibility.  That is a lesson today’s GOP never learned.

 

 

If a Bird Looks Like a Duck and Sounds Like a Duck…

Maureen Dowd has it right in her New York Times column last Sunday.  Conservatives are using the budget mess as a tool for promoting their backward social agenda.  It is so obvious that even I have argued the point in this blog.

While supposedly working to fix the budget mess, some political leaders push against science and attempt to rewrite history in just about every area of social progress this country has enjoyed for generations.  We still have hearings attempting to counter the science of global warming, efforts to roll back Medicare and privatize Social Security, legislation to ease financial and environment regulations, and laws dissolving the power of unions. 

This is all done under the guise of balancing our budget mess by removing the burden of government and letting free market efficiency solve our problems.  Really?

Haven’t we been through decades of reduced regulation, more free market “efficiency”, and smaller government?  What results have these decades delivered to us?

The middle class is suffering.  Real wages for most Americans are flat or declining.  We are losing ground in education, health care, and other basic services.  Our infrastructure is decades behind other advanced countries and declining fast.  We are in multiple wars we need not be fighting.  The list goes on…so by all means, let’s give conservative principles more time to do more harm.

But what are they doing to help our budget?  Is the budget the primary concern? 

First off, let’s get one thing straight.  There is a difference between not being able to “live within our means” and choosing not to fund our needs.  Conservatives have been deliberately underfunding government since the early 1980s, or, to me more specific, they have deliberately underfunding the social programs that have supported our nation’s success and progress. 

“Starve the beast” has been a deliberate policy of unfunding government in order to justify cuts to it.  Today this strategy is a normalized way of doing business in government from the local to the national level.  No one seems to question it.  But again one has to ask what all of this cutting has done for us.

Today conservatives are using the budget crisis as an excuse for their selfish social agenda.  Eliminate public employee collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin?  Sure!  It’s all about balancing the budget.  Again, we have a problem here that is about choices, and the choices have little to do with solving budget problems.  Budgets can be balanced by fair and progressive tax policy or it can be balanced by putting the burden on state employees. 

Even successful programs like Medicare and Social Security are threatened by misleading and distorted rhetoric.  THese programs have been demonized as “entitlements”.  If you’re a Michele Bachmann, these valuable social programs even threaten your freedom.  The craziness has no end.

And that’s the point here.  We have a politically divided country.  On one side we have civically responsible and intelligent people and on the other we have Republicans.

Republicans are not the solution, they are the problem.  You only need to pay attention and respect facts to understand this.  Yet people hide from pointing fingers.  Blame is due where it is due.  After all if a bird looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it might be a duck.  In this case the birds are turkeys and they come in all shades of conservative red.