Just Don't Want to Take our Medicine

We need to start living in reality folks. No, really, we do. There are just too many problems our country faces for the majority of our citizens to be living in fantasy land. And right now, that’s just where we are: politicians continue posturing, the media continues to ignore core issues and focus on gossip, and most Americans carry with them an ideology that brands itself as common sense, but in reality, is grounded in foolish country mantras and backwater thinking. In short, like our besieged, ineffective president, we spend a lot of time looking good and sounding good, but not a lot of time getting anything done.
Take our current economic crisis, for instance. State governments everywhere have massive, gaping holes in their state budgets due to the recession, and yet so far, the federal government hasn’t done anything to aid states. Politically, everyone is trying to merge what works for individuals with a solution for government, saying things like, “we’ll just have to tighten our belts,” and “we need to cut spending.” And that sounds really great until you think about it for a second and you realize it’s a complete load of baloney. If we cut spending, that means we are cutting education. Anywhere between 50 and 75% of most state’s budgets are spent on education. If we cut education, we negatively impact our economy in 3 ways: 1) in the immediate short term, teachers are cut, and no new teachers are hired, which means we have more people on unemployment, and less people with stable careers buying goods and services and otherwise stimulating the economy; 2) the cost of a college education is driven higher, meaning it is accessible for fewer students, meaning less qualified, trained, and creative people able to enter the work force in the near future; and 3) in the long term, we create a working class that is less well educated and skilled in general.
Obviously, the knee-jerk reaction is: how can you say teachers are stimulating the economy when our tax money pays their salaries? Well, the simple explanation is that the tax rate isn’t going up—no more money needs to come out of your pocket to pay to keep teachers in the classroom. I am not suggesting that we raise taxes to fund our state budget shortfalls, but that we redirect federal money to fill them (yes, in Oregon, 66 and 67 were supposed to do just this, but 95% of Oregonians are completely unaffected by those taxes, and the few that are can afford to be).
Unfortunately, this idea exists that we don’t have enough revenue to accomplish all the things we need to accomplish as a country, and that is simply a myth. The real problem is that too much of our federal and state budgets go toward industries that generate little to no economic benefit for our country. We spend far too much money on the military ($663 billion a year, plus $52 billion for the department of veterans affairs) and far too much money on incarceration (states, more so than the federal government, but to the tune of $69 billion).
Here’s a hint: lets get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, OR cut the military budget by $100 billion—since that’s only 2/13 of the overall budget, we really ought to be able to manage that. Additionally, if we decriminalized marijuana, we could cut our incarceration and enforcement costs tremendously as well.
The problem again, is that doing either of these things would allow a lot of people with interests contrary to those of the American people to say a lot of things that would sound good. Things like: “You can’t cut the military—we’ll be attacked!” and “Obama and the Democrats legalized marijuana—what’s next? Pornography on the White House lawn?” And the media would beat the issue to death in a totally unprofessional way, and poor, conservative Americans would be outraged, and the Republicans would be swept into office in the next election in order to reverse these supposedly egregious policies.
So, maybe Obama is smarter than I think, or at least more pragmatic. It’s not that our country isn’t ready for single payer health care, the legalization of marijuana, or scaling back the military industrial complex, but given the modern U.S. political climate and the media lens through which everything is filtered, we won’t accept them. Thus, our only option is to cut our state government, specifically education, or pass taxes on the back of the middle class to pay for our shortfalls. The end result is a bad economy.
For a country so desperate for a cure to our economic ills, we sure don’t want to take our medicine.