Picture this: a family is sitting around the dining room table, discussing their options for getting out of debt. Dad has a plan.
“Okay, guys, we currently have more debt than we’ve ever had as a family. I’ve come up with a great plan for paying off all the bills and getting out of this mess. After all, our bills and credit card debt are higher than they’ve ever been before and we have to get it back to what it was when there was just mom and me… before we decided to have ten kids.”
“But honey,” responds mom, “there were only two of us back then. We lived in a small, cheap apartment. Now we’re making payments on a $175,000 house and three cars. We didn’t have all these bills for health care for twelve of us instead of two. The only college loans we had to pay off were our own. Of course our expenses are higher. There are a lot more of us than there were back then.”
The kids all nod in agreement.
“Absolutely correct, sweetheart. So here’s what I want to do. I want to use the debt-reduction plan proposed by Paul Ryan. The guy’s a genius and he’s dealing with a much bigger problem than we have. After all, if we can’t trust our politicians, who can we trust?”
Nobody nods in agreement… not even the four-year-old twins.
“Here’s my plan. We’ve been trying to keep up with the Jones family down the block. Even though Mr. Jones makes $500 million a year, their expenses are much higher than ours. They need more money to maintain their lifestyle. So… the best way to get ourselves out of debt is to adopt the republican proposal ourselves. Listen to this: we can get out of debt—first of all—by cutting the money we have coming in each month and giving the extra to the Joneses. Then we drop our health and homeowners insurance, go on food stamps and/or start hitting the free food pantries. We’ll be out of debt in no time… and the Jones family won’t have to sacrifice an iota of their lifestyle.”
Mom and the kids look at each other, then at dad. In unison, they respond: “YOU IDIOT!” Then, again in unison, they stand up and head for the front door… never to be seen again. Dad, of course is sad that his family is gone but—on the other hand—he’s kinda happy: eleven fewer mouths to feed!
In today’s (April 11, 2011) New York Times:
Mr. Ryan said it would cut $6 trillion in the coming decade, though budget analysts questioned some of the claimed savings. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program for future generations and slash spending for the need-based Medicaid program and other domestic initiatives, while largely sparing the Pentagon and cutting $4 trillion more in corporate and high-income taxes.
This is the plan that the head of our imaginary family just proposed, for all intents and purposes. Another $4 TRILLION in tax cuts so the rich can continue to get richer. Turning Medicare into a “voucher program” will—as I understand it—give the poorest among us a few bucks to buy their own insurance at the going market rate. That’s definitely going to cut a huge number of people from the insurance company's lists of subscribers.
The really desperately poor will have their Medicaid slashed (remember those people on their way to the operating room when Arizona’s governor announced that Medicaid would no longer pay for their transplants, since the state needs the money for prisons?) Ryan’s plan will also slash unspecified “other domestic initiatives,” which may add money to the government’s income but will, or should, hugely increase government expenses: more handouts to the un- or under-employed; more food banks and homeless shelters. They’ll probably have to pay a lot more for medical services, since many millions of people will no longer have health care or the money to pay for emergency medical care.
Keep this in mind: more huge tax cuts for the richest among us REDUCES THE GOVERNMENT’S INCOME BY TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS while increasing the wealth of the top one percent. The more you cut taxes, the less money the government collects to pay its bills. Yes, it’s lovely for the rich to get richer. But… the less money the government has, the less they can spend on trivial stuff like health programs; food programs; police and fire protection; and a huge number of other services that the government currently provides for the country and for the 99% of us at the bottom of the food chain.
According to the 2010 census, there are now about 310 million people in the U.S. Of course the stupid debt is higher than it has ever been in the history of our country: there are at least ten million more of us than there were in 2000 (the last time the Federal budget was balanced). And there are probably about 308 or 309 million more than there were when this country became a country.
Of course the government’s debt is higher! If you keep slashing its income to benefit the multimillionaires and billionaires, it gets less money. When the income is slashed that much, social services and more have to be cut. For the ultra-conservatives, the best place to slash the budget is to take away services that help the poorest citizens. It’s beginning to seem like it’s deliberate: quit providing health care, food stamps, and other services and sooner or later, many will die… from starvation, freezing, or from stuff as easily treatable or preventable as a bad case of the flu. However… somebody would have to dispose of all the dead bodies. Hope they include that little social service in the new deficit reduction plan!
A program called “Greed” aired last week on one of the History channels. It was very interesting and pointed out how, when greed continues to increase, countries and even great empires fall. The U.S. has, by definition, been an empire from the time when we first took possession of places like the Philippines and Cuba, early in the 20th century. What you get when a country turns its focus from taking care of its own people and spends its money and human resources on people in countries it has conquered; when it has military outposts all over the world… well, that’s part of what you can track to see if your country is an empire. Just like the Roman Empire, this one we live in is in decline. There’s always another country to support, or invade, or to go to war with.
Meanwhile, our highways and bridges are crumbling around us. Our coastal waters and our fresh water supply are more and more polluted. We seem to be hell-bent on destroying our environment and our planet. That’s much easier, I guess, than asking the richest of businesses to behave responsibly and clean up the messes they create. Somehow, the top 1% seem to think that they’ll be immune to the consequences of neglecting their own country. If there’s no clean air to breathe or clean water left to drink anywhere, do they really believe that their money will be able to buy them some?
On the “Greed” show, they did a moderately comprehensive bit on what led to the Great Depression. I wondered how close our current situation is to what was happening back then. I got out my favorite American history book, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and started reading the relevant chapters. Chapter 10, “The Other Civil War,” discusses the demonstrations and riots of the bottom 99% against the top 1%. We seem to be doing a lot more of that these days although—at least on the protestors’ part—it hasn’t gotten as violent as the protests and riots did in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Chapter 11, “Robber Barons and Rebels” (which I’m still reading), I learned that before the stock market crash, the rich were getting enormously richer and the poor were getting more and more desperate. In my first political science class many years ago, one of the “required reading” textbooks said that the only reason FDR and his administration started Social Security in the first place was to forestall what the president believed could lead to an overthrown of the government--the author’s take on the situation.
“They” say that if we forget our history (or never learn it because a whole heck of a lot of it isn’t included in our K-12 history books)… if we forget our history, we are sure to repeat it. I sincerely believe that if Mr. Ryan and the far right get their way, we are in for much worse than anything we’ve seen in many decades.
You don’t have to be a history expert. You don’t have to really do much of anything beyond having a quick look at the math: if you slash the income of the government to give more money to the richest people… something has to give. Remember, those are our tax dollars being contributed to the “haves” and leaving little or nothing for the rest of us.
MSNBC’s newest motto is “Lean Forward”. Catchy, huh! I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to tell us… maybe something like ‘move ahead’ or ‘it will all get better if we look to the future’ or…? You can interpret it for yourself. My significantly less optimistic take: if somebody doesn’t pay attention to all those Pulitzer Prize winning economists, world history, and just plain, old-fashioned good sense and basic math, we indeed could be in for very lean (and possibly violent) times as we move forward.
Maybe I should write a well-researched book on the Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Never mind. Good history books require some time to put things in perspective. I’ll leave that for a future generation of writers.
