Follow Through

Lately, it seems our government can’t get anything done, while the vast majority of Americans are stuck suffering in a terrible, jobless economy. Understandably, this has caused an upwelling of populist anger against government in general. Mainstream Republicans seem to have conveniently forgotten everything that happened before Obama took office, as if they suddenly woke up from a dream to find themselves in a nightmarish economy complete with burgeoning federal budgets and a Democratic party back to its usual tax and spend policies. Even less mentally stable conservatives have gone so far as to form the Tea Party (ironically, the only tea party ever to occur where manners and civility are fundamentally discouraged), accusing President Obama of being a Marxist, alleging that health care reform is an attack on freedom, and pledging themselves to such erroneous conservatives as Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin.
If the noxious stink of immoral righteousness, racism, hypocrisy, and plain, bare assed foolishness gets any worse (it smells like rendered hot dog fat, old Bibles, canned goods, and gunpowder, by the way), everyone right of center might simply spontaneously combust from sheer hubris. These people obviously have no bearing on reality, and while it’s always fun to list the mistakes of the Bush administration and his Republican Congress (it would be a lot more fun if we weren’t in such deep shit right now), clearly the folks on the right aren’t going to listen—they are simply too deeply ensconced in conservative lore to take an objective view of where we are and how we got here.
So instead, let’s take a different approach. Let’s examine the ideology of the right if it were to be implemented, and try to predict what would happen. It’s an exercise I call “follow through,” and it is an excellent way to separate practical proposals from pleasant sounding but impractical rhetoric.
First of all, conservatives don’t want health care reform. They cite three principal reasons for this: 1) its too expensive, 2) the free market is more efficient than socialism, and 3) it is an attack on freedom. Never mind that every one of these arguments is inherently irrational (1-it would be more expensive, as you will see, to not reform health care; 2-we don’t have a free market health care system; and 3-that is just fucking stupid and only an absolute moron would believe such nonsense)—let’s just go ahead and see what would happen if we don’t reform our health care system.
Yesterday, Anthem Blue Cross, a health insurance company in California, raised its customer’s rates 39 percent—its parent company, Wellpoint, saw its profits rise to over $2.3 billion last quarter. Over the last decade, health care premiums for families have risen 131%, and worker contributions to their premiums have risen 128% according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation (http://facts.kff.org/chart.aspx?ch=1182). A principle reason that insurance companies can raise rates without consequence is that they currently enjoy an antitrust exemption status, meaning that in most cases there is basically no competition—otherwise, companies like Anthem Blue Cross couldn’t get away with sharply raising their customer’s rates on a whim.
Currently, Republicans and a few conservative Democrats oppose lifting the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies. So, if we follow through with the position of being against health care reform, as Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Partiers say they are, then by default, they are for insurance companies having the right to raise premiums as high and as often as they like. They are also for a ballooning federal deficit (the government already bears a tremendous burden of paying for health care), for making sure that people with disabilities and other pre-existing conditions are denied coverage, for denying coverage to anyone whose employer doesn’t provide it (at $400 a month on average for an individual, and $1000 a month for families, it costs as much to have health insurance as it does to pay rent http://healthinsurance.about.com/b/2009/04/24/poll-shows-the-average-health-insurance-premium-out-of-reach-for-uninsured.htm), and for continuing to let taxpayers cover uninsured users of the system through the absurdly expensive emergency rooms of their local hospitals. By being against health insurance reform, they are in favor of all of those things, an untenable position if they followed through with their argument.
Conservatives are also upset about is government spending. They are mad about the bank bailout (which you may recall, was enacted by Bush http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/24/bush.bailout/index.html, or if you prefer to get your news from Fox http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,428921,00.html), and mad about the federal deficit. Yet, ideologically, Republicans are also in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, which would further exacerbate the budget shortfall. Moreover, one of the largest sectors of the federal budget is defense spending, and yet, not a single person on the right would dare cut the military. It’s the same with our prison system, the largest, most expensive in the world, and yet conservatives continue to push for longer crime sentences (which have been shown to have almost no effect on crime whatsoever), and refuse to even consider decriminalizing fairly innocuous drugs such as marijuana. Thus, on the one hand, conservatives say they want to cut taxes, and yet, on the other, they clamor for and justify some of the most expensive government programs.
Recently, in Oregon, conservative groups fought diligently against measures 66 and 67, initiatives that made small increases on some corporations and citizens making over $125,000 so that the state could pay for education and other state services. In this particular situation, it sets up a rather disturbing train of thought, which is nothing new: conservatives bashing education, and especially, teachers. But let’s follow this through: what responsible parent would say to their child, “education doesn’t matter, and your teachers are assholes?” Hopefully no one. Yet, that is exactly what conservatives have been doing, and on issues other than education.
Going down the list of ideas and policies conservatives say they believe in, almost every single one is untenable if we “follow through” with logic: they want to privatize social security and at the same time, oppose regulation of the financial system. But where would our society be if we had privatized social security, as Bush proposed, before the financial meltdown in 2008, which was caused, in large degree, by deregulation?
Suppose we outlaw unions, another conservative goal: eventually if we follow that through, without the ability to collectively bargain, teachers, machinists, electricians, plumbers, and other skilled professionals would be forced to work at substandard wages, possibly without proper safety precautions. Over the long run, fewer people would choose to become involved in these careers, leading to a further decline in U.S. manufacturing and education. This is the last thing a struggling economy needs.
Finally, suppose we adhere to the conservative belief in trickle down, or supply side economics. This means that the government cuts taxes on all businesses, and possibly even provides subsidies to support domestic industries. Seems like a sound practice, right? Wrong. Follow through with the idea. Cutting taxes on industry means more money has to come out of the pockets of the lower and middle class to provide revenue for the government to function, or government services, which tend to benefit the middle and lower class, have to be cut.
The money saved by corporations could be used to hire more U.S. workers, or for research and development, which would be good for the economy, but there are a number of other things that might happen to it, including: paying higher dividends to investors, paying higher salaries or awarding bonuses to company executives (see AIG and Goldman Sachs), building, manufacturing, or engineering products overseas and paying foreign employees, or, quite possibly, given the recent supreme court decision to enshrine corporate personhood, spending money on lobbyists or political ads to purchase representatives, senators, and judges of both state and federal government, all of which would be bad for the average American, and bad for our economy.
So while conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Republicans are all up in arms about the current state of our nation, the plain fact is that none of their ideas, nothing in their ideology, is going to make a damn bit of difference when it comes to solving our problems, IF, we follow through with the consequences of such policies.
(Wow, see kiddos, we just deconstructed the entire conservative world view…neat, huh?)