Tag Archives: Tea Party

Political Rants

Samesville.

Back again, right? Every couple of months or so we are faced with a manufactured fiscal crisis. Again, this is by design, not by necessity. The Republican party – particularly the hard core of yargle-bargle types known as the “tea party” – has long pursued the practice of enormous deficit spending while they hold the White House and austerity when they are in the opposition. This time around, it’s austerity with a vengeance. Sure, the president signed on to this sequester deal, but it was in response to another manufactured fiscal crisis, brought on by the newly-installed G.O.P. Congress in 2011. In other words, if it wasn’t the sequester, it would be the debt ceiling, or the budget, or some key appropriations bill – anything to jam up the works.

Patron saint of the whiners. There is nothing surprising about this. Grover Norquist, patron saint of the cheapskates (and clearly someone who did not like eating his peas when he was 4), articulated it quite clearly when he said, in effect, when Democrats are in power, force them to rule like Republicans. Parse out the irony (as mentioned earlier, Republicans are much more generous with presidents of their own party) and you can see the sense in what they’re doing. Of course, it goes beyond that. I think most Republicans are smart enough to know that the kinds of cuts they’re advocating will result in a second recession. That works to their political benefit. Winning is paramount to them, even (and perhaps especially) when they lose. If they can discredit a Democratic president, so much the better.

The Democrats are enablers of this continuing train wreck. They were handed the reins in 2009, and instead of meeting the financial crisis with a response of an appropriate magnitude, they allowed conservatives to talk them down to a small-bore strategy that simply was not sufficient to pull us out. The stimulus worked to the extent that it was designed to work; when the money ran out, so did the steam. Now we are in what Krugman rightly calls a depression – an economy that is not shrinking, but not really gaining ground either – and all Washington can talk about is cutting the freaking deficit. The problem is unemployment, not short-term debt. Fix one, and the other will take care of itself. Want to solve long-term debt? Stop maintaining health insurance as the province of private profit-making industry; expand Medicare and you will make it solvent.

How do you get these people to do the right thing? To borrow a phrase from V.S. Naipaul, a million mutinies now. Tell your representative and your senators that you want them to invest in the economy, not starve it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Pay now, pay later.

What does the tea-party acronym stand for again? Taxed Enough Already, as some of you recall. That’s the credo for our age, whether or not there’s any truth to the sentiment. If people are paying higher taxes, they’re doing so on the local level; as county and municipal governments try to grapple with austerity policies from above, they resort to whatever means of revenue generation that may be available to them. Federal austerity starves state coffers; that in turn negatively impacts localities. Combine that with the fact that we are in the midst of a depression of sorts – i.e. a period when people need greater assistance from the government, not less – and that causes upward pressure on local taxes.

When that happens, people inevitably look for someone to blame. Lately that someone has been unionized public employees. Sad to say, my fellow Americans are all too quick to think the worst of them. That’s not surprising. A lot of editorial ink, political rhetoric, and advertising resources have been placed against vilifying the very notion of working for government. It’s a waste of money, they’re a bunch of lazy layabouts who can’t make it in the private sector, etc., etc.  For a long time that blanket criticism seemed confined to, say, the people down at the DMV, but in recent years it’s been expanded to teachers and even public safety employees.

Here’s what the critics – at least, the non-cynical critics – don’t appear to understand: When you lay off public workers, you create more problems than you solve. For one thing, you make whatever institution they worked for less effective; that means less value to the taxpayers. For another, those individuals are now out in the public sector workforce, competing for the same jobs that everyone else is trying to get. Thirdly, their lost income results in less consumer spending (yes, public workers buy groceries, clothes, and gasoline just like the rest of us), which means lower consumption tax revenues, which means – yep – budget gaps of the type we’re grappling with now.

What’s needed, as Jim Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others have pointed out, is federal stimulus – aid to state and local governments so that they can stop shedding jobs and adding to the ranks of the unemployed, infrastructure spending that will build out the economy and create jobs at the same time, and other public investments.

Perhaps if the GOP could take a break from passing radical anti-abortion legislation for about five minutes, perhaps they’d consider doing something about this depression. Just saying.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Moral hazard, part II.

Know what I hate? Well, I’m going to tell you. It’s when people intrude upon your deepest personal life, and then when you object, they accuse you of denying their right to – I don’t know – have everything exactly their way, I guess. That’s how I see the hyper-religious crowd who have been complaining about the mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception. Obama carved out an exception that should satisfy anyone – one that goes way beyond any necessary relief from what’s required, in my view. And still they are crowing about it, comparing it to religious persecution, even Nazi-ism in the more extreme cases.

The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a “conscience” exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna Carta, even though few of them have ever read the document in its entirety. Next, they’ll demand all proposed laws draw on neolithic cave paintings.) Then there are the fetal “personhood” statute and vaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia, scaled back in the face of massive protests by women in that divided state. This … from the party that was all about jobs, jobs, jobs during the 2010 election. See what happens when you trust them?

It should surprise no one that Republicans used the economy as a trojan horse to conceal their deeply unpopular, highly regressive right-wing social agenda. It was, after all, GOP-driven policies (aided, of course, by watery Democrats) that blew a massive hole in the federal budget back in 2001, expanding it in subsequent years with undeclared wars and unwarranted tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. Those tax cuts were supposed to have expired by now, but as every politician knows, that ain’t gonna’ happen … because no one has the spine to allow it. Meanwhile, we all pay the price. My city in upstate New York is starved for funds largely because the Feds are starving the States, and the States are passing the cuts along to municipalities. That and inaction on health and retirement reform (not privatization, but the kind that would work) is resulting in massive tax hikes at the local level – close to 20% for the coming fiscal year. This just to spare the Romneys of the world a return to the favorable income tax rates of the 1990s, when they gained plenty enough wealth, thank you very much.

The Republicans have nothing to offer on the economy. And unless we push them, neither will the Democrats.

luv u,

jp