I just don’t know where the Republican hate train is going to stop next, but if you’re a fucking nut, apparently it’s “ALL ABOARD!” All aboard for hating women, hating teachers, and hating the poor. And the conductors? Not elected officials of course—that would be much too democratic, even in a system that’s rife with lobbying money and general malfeasance. No, it’s the Koch brothers, a couple of ultra conservative fucktards whose mission it is to turn back the clock to the late 19th century: a quaint time when workers were oppressed, oligarchs ran the government, and you could slap a bitch down if she spoke up without worrying about domestic violence charges.
That’s right, these guys dream big—they hate half of everyone right off the bat. After all, who needs women? Haven’t they basically ruined everything? I mean, at the very beginning, that sassy bitch Eve just had to eat that apple—isn’t that like a woman to want what she can’t have—what a slut.
Let’s face it, women are just no good at doing anything (men would be much better at having children if we had the organs—and we wouldn’t complain so much about it either), and they cause a lot of fucking problems. History is full of examples: Helen of Troy was a war starting whore, Cleopatra basically caused the downfall of Rome, and then in the middle ages they had this whole witch problem—and were there ever any male witches? No, of course not: we don’t need a stick between our legs to feel special.
And then, in 1920, those stupid fucking liberals had to pass that goddamn amendment giving those breast bearing humanoids the right to vote. What the hell are they doing voting? What the hell are they doing wearing shoes for that matter? Shouldn’t they be at home washing dishes, taking care of children, and cooking while pregnant?
Well, the Koch brothers and their Republican cronies are delivering a clear message: satisfy me sexually and make me a pie bitch! All across the U.S., state Republicans are passing bills to limit access to reproductive health for women. And in the House of Representatives, they’ve gone ahead and slashed funding for planned parenthood—never mind that only 3 percent of their activities involve abortion procedures, or the fact that they don’t use federal money for abortions. Look, if a few women have to die because they won’t be able to be screened for cancer at Planned Parenthood, or receive treatment or care for STD’s, that is just fine with Republicans. And access to contraception? Screw that—if one of Eve’s daughters wants to get busy she can take the fucking consequences. Kinda hard to be an uppity, Sex in the City watching, politically active woman when your pregnant, isn’t it?
Of course, when the baby does come, Republicans don’t want to give him a free ride either. Nope, sorry junior, you’ve gotta pull yourself up by your little fucking bootstraps if you want to get anywhere, and you might as well learn early, because if the Koch brothers get their way, you’re going to have to learn on your own—like God intended.
After all, if there is anything worse than a woman, it’s a fucking no good, waste of space, caring, bleeding heart teacher. What a bunch of assholes! The only things a teacher is good for are holding union meetings and stealing money from taxpayers—that’s money that could be well spent on tax breaks for corporations and rich people! They’re the only ones that create jobs. What has a teacher ever done? Teach a kid to read…big fucking deal. If that kid were a real American, he’d have learned how to read by pulling The Fountainhead off of his parents bookcase at age 4—doesn’t need a whiny teacher to tell him to do that.
Hey, we all know that teachers make way too much money, and their benefits are too good as well. Did you know that most teachers make well over $80,000 a year, and they actually get paid money when they take a sick day to go to the doctor? And when they retire, they make even more. Those greedy bastards are just sucking our states dry of money, and for what: so those glorified fucking baby sitters can parade around with their masters degrees and spread their communist views—or worse, teach critical thinking, evolution, or math? Look, did they need teachers in the middle ages, or in the industrial age—fuck no! When you were seven, you picked up a shovel, you went into a mine, and you were happy with your company scrip.
Rest assured, the Republicans, thank God, are going to put a stop to those dumb teachers trying to teach. First, they’re going to get rid of their right to collectively bargain, which Republican governors are doing across the country. That’ll prevent strikes and other kinds of commi bullshit from happening during elections, like voting. Then, we can cut their pay and benefits so that no one in their right mind will ever want to teach, especially since it requires an advanced degree. Then the whole system will fail, and we can really swell the ranks of unskilled workers and get people to do the fuck what we tell them. Work motherfuckers! Work with your back and your legs, and don’t let that stupid thing between your ears get in the way!
I’m telling you, this is the Republican dream. A world where teachers are laughed at, or killed, as tea partiers and an Iowa attorney general have suggested. A world where women that make their own decisions are punished horribly, and sometimes, just for being a woman. That’ll teach them to be born without a penis. HATE!!!!
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Follow Through, Part 2
So awhile back, I wrote a column called “follow through,” that suggested that Republicans and conservatives follow through their political philosophies to examine what kind of fruit they would bear if they were enacted. Given the recent uproar about unions in Wisconsin and other states, entitlement spending (Medicare and Social Security), and state and federal deficits, it might be wise to see what would happen if the Republicans were to got their way.
Let’s begin with the union issue. First off, I’ll agree that in hard economic times, unions have a social responsibility to take less in pay and benefits—to do otherwise would be to shut down certain necessary civic functions, such as teaching, nursing, fire fighting, public safety, etc., and that is not fair to the taxpaying public. However, governments, whether state or federal, have a responsibility to pay these people a fair wage and provide decent benefits, precisely because they are so necessary to each and every U.S. citizen.
Ultimately, this means the right to collectively bargain contracts, because a single individual simply does not have the power to compel the employer to provide fair wages and benefits; an individual is replaceable, so even if that means, say, firing a school’s best teacher, the impact to the student, while regrettable, can be justified. In such a system, wages would become unfair, especially when government revenue was low. On the other hand, firing a massive group of good teachers would impact education so tremendously, that such an act would be unthinkable—an option only to those with base motives. This is the power of collective bargaining—it allows a group of employees with a similar set of specific training and talents to attain fair compensation for their work.
Do unions sometimes go too far? Absolutely. But the right to collectively bargain isn’t at fault for union greed or poor judgment on the part of the arbiters. In fact, it could be argued that the right to collectively bargain is contained in the 1st Amendment, which states that: “Congress shall make no law…abridging…the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” Make no mistake, governments and businesses have the right to fire union workers if they cannot pay their contracts, as well as the right not to hire or renew the contracts of union workers. What they cannot do is deny workers the right to organize and collectively bargain.
But that could all change if Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, gets his way. Walker has submitted a bill in the Wisconsin legislature that would eliminate the right of public employees to collectively bargain. This has sparked a number of protests by union workers, resulted in the shutdown of Madison area schools, and has Wisconsin’s Democratic representatives literally on the run (Wisconsin law requires a quorum, which means that at least one representative from the other party must be present in order to hold a vote; thus, by leaving, the Democrats are stalling the progress of the bill—a sort of traveling filibuster).
While it remains to be seen what is actually going to happen in Wisconsin, let’s assume Walker gets his way and outlaws collective bargaining for public employees. The first things to go will be health insurance, simply because other than a worker’s salary, it is the most expensive benefit. Of course, this includes not only the worker, but their family as well, so the number of uninsured in Wisconsin will skyrocket. In turn, health clinics will lose some, if not much of their regular, preventative business, while hospitals will receive more patients in their emergency rooms, driving up the cost of insurance for other citizens in Wisconsin. The result: higher premiums for private citizens and businesses and poorer health outcomes for many of Wisconsin’s citizens.
Worse, should Wisconsin’s government, under Walker’s direction, choose to cut salaries and retirement pensions, there will be an obvious drop-off for Wisconsin’s economy that extends beyond healthcare. Consumer spending will sag, real estate values will fall, and businesses will have to sell to a smaller customer base.
Conservatives may say that these cuts are necessary, and they may be right to a certain degree, but why not allow unions a place at the table to negotiate where and how the cuts are made, knowing that the state of Wisconsin has to balance its budget?
The truth is that Walker’s move is not simply about money—it’s a political calculation. Essentially, Walker is eliminating his competition. Unions tend to back Democrats in elections. No dues and no right to organize as workers means that a significant portion of his opposition will be absent in the next election—and that’s to leave out the possibility that it is payback for opposing him in the first place. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard it before when you learned about the 19th and early 20th century in your U.S. History class.
On the federal level, Republicans are clamoring to go back to the era of Robber Barons in their own way: by cutting the notorious “entitlement” programs Medicare and Social Security (I don’t know how it can be an entitlement when every citizen pays taxes out of every paycheck to know that they will have these programs when they reach a certain age). And, basically, if Republicans get their way, the things that would happen in Wisconsin if they outlaw collective bargaining for public employees would happen nationally, only on a much larger and more horrific scale.
Consider what would happen if Medicare were curtailed or cut significantly. Seniors would now have to buy private insurance to subsidize what is left of Medicare. This insurance would of course be enormously expensive, because the elderly use a ton of health care, and much of it is very expensive. Ultimately, when the money dried up, families would be forced to make an awful decision: do we keep grandpa alive and spend enormous sums of money to do it, or is it just to expensive to justify for a man that might only live for 5 more years. Oh, but I suppose there is always the option that we’d just have many, many more admissions to the emergency room, and many, many more people that couldn’t pay the bill when they left, which everyone else’s insurance gets to fill in the gaps.
Now suppose on top of that, our Republican friends decide to cut Social Security. Get out of bed grandma—time to go back to work! You get to stop when you die. This may be the extreme, but a number of terrible things would occur: 1) retirement would be delayed significantly, leading to less opportunity for younger workers, 2) a significant number of people would fail to save enough for retirement, leaving families the burden to pick up the cost and/or the terrible proposition of many elderly facing financial ruin while they near death, and 3) there would simply be less money in the economy.
This final factor is the ultimate problem with what Republicans are proposing. Simply put, when dollars are cut for entitlements, public employees, etc, it means a good number of people won’t have money to spend, and that is not a good thing for an economy that is just beginning to get back on its feet. Our very fragile recovery’s success is put in jeopardy with every cost cutting measure. That is a fact.
At the same time, no one can deny that the current levels of spending at both state and federal levels are too high, and the federal deficit is a very real problem that is going to require the government to tighten its belt. The question is where we make those cuts. If we make them in social programs, public employees, etc, it is a double edged sword, because if the economy slows down as it would with these kinds of cuts, the government’s tax revenues will drop as well; then the question becomes whether you save more with the cuts than you lose concurrently with lower tax revenues?
The truth is, if we’re serious about the debt, the only sane thing to do is to cut areas that would have less of an effect on the domestic economy, such as military spending, procurements, and foreign aid. The other thing that has to be done is to figure out ways to increase tax revenue, and the best way to do this without harming the economy is to tax the very wealthy at a higher rate, and eliminate tax loopholes for multinational corporations, i.e. big oil.
But we know the Republicans won’t do these things, and so far all the Democrats have done is talk about them. Cutting government spending sounds really great, but if Republicans get their way and cut the programs they want to cut, we should all get used to 10% unemployment, a bad economy, and little opportunity for the average American to better themselves.
Let’s begin with the union issue. First off, I’ll agree that in hard economic times, unions have a social responsibility to take less in pay and benefits—to do otherwise would be to shut down certain necessary civic functions, such as teaching, nursing, fire fighting, public safety, etc., and that is not fair to the taxpaying public. However, governments, whether state or federal, have a responsibility to pay these people a fair wage and provide decent benefits, precisely because they are so necessary to each and every U.S. citizen.
Ultimately, this means the right to collectively bargain contracts, because a single individual simply does not have the power to compel the employer to provide fair wages and benefits; an individual is replaceable, so even if that means, say, firing a school’s best teacher, the impact to the student, while regrettable, can be justified. In such a system, wages would become unfair, especially when government revenue was low. On the other hand, firing a massive group of good teachers would impact education so tremendously, that such an act would be unthinkable—an option only to those with base motives. This is the power of collective bargaining—it allows a group of employees with a similar set of specific training and talents to attain fair compensation for their work.
Do unions sometimes go too far? Absolutely. But the right to collectively bargain isn’t at fault for union greed or poor judgment on the part of the arbiters. In fact, it could be argued that the right to collectively bargain is contained in the 1st Amendment, which states that: “Congress shall make no law…abridging…the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” Make no mistake, governments and businesses have the right to fire union workers if they cannot pay their contracts, as well as the right not to hire or renew the contracts of union workers. What they cannot do is deny workers the right to organize and collectively bargain.
But that could all change if Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, gets his way. Walker has submitted a bill in the Wisconsin legislature that would eliminate the right of public employees to collectively bargain. This has sparked a number of protests by union workers, resulted in the shutdown of Madison area schools, and has Wisconsin’s Democratic representatives literally on the run (Wisconsin law requires a quorum, which means that at least one representative from the other party must be present in order to hold a vote; thus, by leaving, the Democrats are stalling the progress of the bill—a sort of traveling filibuster).
While it remains to be seen what is actually going to happen in Wisconsin, let’s assume Walker gets his way and outlaws collective bargaining for public employees. The first things to go will be health insurance, simply because other than a worker’s salary, it is the most expensive benefit. Of course, this includes not only the worker, but their family as well, so the number of uninsured in Wisconsin will skyrocket. In turn, health clinics will lose some, if not much of their regular, preventative business, while hospitals will receive more patients in their emergency rooms, driving up the cost of insurance for other citizens in Wisconsin. The result: higher premiums for private citizens and businesses and poorer health outcomes for many of Wisconsin’s citizens.
Worse, should Wisconsin’s government, under Walker’s direction, choose to cut salaries and retirement pensions, there will be an obvious drop-off for Wisconsin’s economy that extends beyond healthcare. Consumer spending will sag, real estate values will fall, and businesses will have to sell to a smaller customer base.
Conservatives may say that these cuts are necessary, and they may be right to a certain degree, but why not allow unions a place at the table to negotiate where and how the cuts are made, knowing that the state of Wisconsin has to balance its budget?
The truth is that Walker’s move is not simply about money—it’s a political calculation. Essentially, Walker is eliminating his competition. Unions tend to back Democrats in elections. No dues and no right to organize as workers means that a significant portion of his opposition will be absent in the next election—and that’s to leave out the possibility that it is payback for opposing him in the first place. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard it before when you learned about the 19th and early 20th century in your U.S. History class.
On the federal level, Republicans are clamoring to go back to the era of Robber Barons in their own way: by cutting the notorious “entitlement” programs Medicare and Social Security (I don’t know how it can be an entitlement when every citizen pays taxes out of every paycheck to know that they will have these programs when they reach a certain age). And, basically, if Republicans get their way, the things that would happen in Wisconsin if they outlaw collective bargaining for public employees would happen nationally, only on a much larger and more horrific scale.
Consider what would happen if Medicare were curtailed or cut significantly. Seniors would now have to buy private insurance to subsidize what is left of Medicare. This insurance would of course be enormously expensive, because the elderly use a ton of health care, and much of it is very expensive. Ultimately, when the money dried up, families would be forced to make an awful decision: do we keep grandpa alive and spend enormous sums of money to do it, or is it just to expensive to justify for a man that might only live for 5 more years. Oh, but I suppose there is always the option that we’d just have many, many more admissions to the emergency room, and many, many more people that couldn’t pay the bill when they left, which everyone else’s insurance gets to fill in the gaps.
Now suppose on top of that, our Republican friends decide to cut Social Security. Get out of bed grandma—time to go back to work! You get to stop when you die. This may be the extreme, but a number of terrible things would occur: 1) retirement would be delayed significantly, leading to less opportunity for younger workers, 2) a significant number of people would fail to save enough for retirement, leaving families the burden to pick up the cost and/or the terrible proposition of many elderly facing financial ruin while they near death, and 3) there would simply be less money in the economy.
This final factor is the ultimate problem with what Republicans are proposing. Simply put, when dollars are cut for entitlements, public employees, etc, it means a good number of people won’t have money to spend, and that is not a good thing for an economy that is just beginning to get back on its feet. Our very fragile recovery’s success is put in jeopardy with every cost cutting measure. That is a fact.
At the same time, no one can deny that the current levels of spending at both state and federal levels are too high, and the federal deficit is a very real problem that is going to require the government to tighten its belt. The question is where we make those cuts. If we make them in social programs, public employees, etc, it is a double edged sword, because if the economy slows down as it would with these kinds of cuts, the government’s tax revenues will drop as well; then the question becomes whether you save more with the cuts than you lose concurrently with lower tax revenues?
The truth is, if we’re serious about the debt, the only sane thing to do is to cut areas that would have less of an effect on the domestic economy, such as military spending, procurements, and foreign aid. The other thing that has to be done is to figure out ways to increase tax revenue, and the best way to do this without harming the economy is to tax the very wealthy at a higher rate, and eliminate tax loopholes for multinational corporations, i.e. big oil.
But we know the Republicans won’t do these things, and so far all the Democrats have done is talk about them. Cutting government spending sounds really great, but if Republicans get their way and cut the programs they want to cut, we should all get used to 10% unemployment, a bad economy, and little opportunity for the average American to better themselves.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
I’m actually quite frightened. Pretty scared actually. And for a big guy, that tends to be cockier than most, that’s not a position I really enjoy. But, having processed the Republican budget proposal, as well as Obama’s, that is the only rational emotional response any human being can have; however, since I’m a man and I don’t have rational emotional responses, I’m just going to get mad.
Let me first sum up for my dear readers what the proposals entail. Basically, Obama’s biggest cut is to be achieved by freezing non-security discretionary spending for 5 years. This means cutting money for programs like the SEC, which oversees the financial industry (gee, I wonder why that could be important?), as well as other programs that improve our environment, support education, etc. The most heinous cuts Obama makes are the ones that reduce help for poor families paying to heat their homes during the winter months, as well as cuts in Medicare payout to doctors, and beginning interest on federal Pell student loans for undergrad and grad students before they graduate.
As usual, this isn’t enough for Republicans, who want to cut every educational, environmental, and social program on the books, while preserving tax breaks for big oil and refusing to make any cuts to the military, even when military leadership has recommended that certain procurements be curtailed because they are obsolete. Somehow those pork projects aren’t the kinds they want to cut, especially when the manufacturing plants are in their district, as is the case with Speaker of the House, John Boehner.
The problem is, neither party is willing to make the cuts necessary to balance the budget, nor are they willing to make the investments that will make our economy more efficient, streamlined, and productive.
The military is a huge portion of the budget, and it is by far the most inefficient spending we engage in as a nation. None of the weapons we build, whether they be plane, ship, bomb, or gun, will ever have a secondary contribution to our economy. In other words, we pay to build things that don’t do anything for us. And then there’s the issue of maintaining a massive standing army—for what? So Republican presidents have the ability to get us in foreign wars that are purposeless? Look, we can all agree that it is necessary to have some kind of military, especially in this day an age, an elite Air Force and Navy, but we are far beyond spending what is necessary for our defense.
Keep in mind, the budget for defense is on the same scale as Medicare and Social Security. But whereas the money we spend on the military, by and large, goes away, the dollars these programs receive are recycled constantly within the economy. Every Medicare dollar goes toward keeping a person healthy—a person, by the way, that has paid into the system for their entire working life—a person by the way, that may be a grandparent, parent, or the human being reading this column. To boot, every Medicare dollar feeds hospital revenues, pays our doctors and nurses salaries, and trickles into the private market from prescription medicine to the Scooter Store. The same can be said of Social Security. It pays for mortgages, rent, groceries, and Christmas presents; anything really, that can be bought in our consumer marketplace. So while all three programs are a similar size in the federal budget, two act to stimulate the domestic economy on primary, secondary, and tertiary levels; whereas with the military, we only reap the salaries we pay to our soldiers and our manufacturing employees—the rest goes abroad, or sits in corporate bank accounts.
This is known in economics as the "Guns vs. Butter" trade off. Does a government spend its money on the military, or on domestic development? Right now, we are spending far more than justified on "Guns," and it's killing us.
The other thing that seems to be left out of the conversation is that just 2 months ago, Obama and congressional Republicans agreed to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, adding an additional $700 billion to the federal deficit. And now we’re in just dire need to cut funding for Social Security, Medicare, and other programs because the deficit is going to swallow us whole? Give me a break.
What all of this clearly illustrates is that politicians will make the easy choices, like giving their rich buddies a tax cut (a vast majority of our elected officials are millionaires and billionaires, and run in those circles), while refusing to approach political issues that might receive criticism or be uncomfortable, for example: cutting military spending, relaxing federal drug laws, or eliminating tax loop holes for multinational corporations (remember, they deal with lobbyists a whole lot more than the average Joe).
The other problem that people don’t seem to want to address is that the two party system, along with the dynamic of American politics, are fundamentally flawed when it comes to addressing difficult issues and solving long term problems. For one, if a politician attempts to take on a politically powerful entity, say for instance the military industrial complex, they are going to face tremendous attacks from the other party during the next election. In the case of the military, that politician will be called “weak on defense,” “a friend to terror,” and God only knows what else.
Second, Americans tend to vote out the party in power when there is a bad economy, and when people are suffering. Underlying message: its actually good for the opposition to make things as bad as they can be going into the next election—this explains Republican political behavior pretty well since Obama’s election in 2008.
Third, because of the tremendous amount of money in our political system from lobbyists and large corporate interests, politicians have little to gain from looking out for the little guy. Average citizens have neither the time, nor money, to effectively lobby their politicians. Thus, it’s easy for politicians in our system to justify cutting programs like unemployment insurance, welfare, education, and other social programs.
Finally, the news media in this country is inaccurate, biased, and full of propaganda. Obviously, most liberals will point to Fox News here, but even a close read of the supposedly liberal New York Times reveals massive lapses in basic journalistic integrity. Bottom line: Americans don’t know who to believe, so they can’t hold politicians accountable in lockstep—we’re so divided that our vote is largely impotent. Moreover, many Americans simply vote against their best interests, which violates the basic tenet of economics: that people will make rational decisions when they have sufficient information about that decision. Guess what’s missing?
Oh, and about those investments we should be making? It’s been shown that spending money on transportation returns as much as 400% the investment for the economy. We also know that programs like food stamps and unemployment have well over a 150% return on their investment. It’s nice to know that Obama’s budget increases spending on transportation, and withholds cutting food stamps and unemployment. It is even better that it includes increased spending on education, whose value to the economy is immeasurable, being that education is the basis upon which civil and modern society it built. The problem is that Republicans are going to fight with our President tooth and nail to cut them all significantly.
Additionally, we must remember that this is only the federal budget. State budgets across the U.S. are bleeding massively, and the single biggest expense on the chopping block is education. What isn’t being talked about? As usual, prisons. Spending on incarceration represents a huge portion of state spending (10% here in Oregon), and yet there is no talk of relaxing drug laws or prison sentences. If anything, people want there to be more punishment, and longer sentences.
So, to sum up, our collective government, state and federal, refuses to cut military spending, prison spending, or close tax loopholes for wealthy corporations and individuals, preferring instead to cut education, social programs, and oversight to protect consumers. And, given our two party system, and the dynamic of media and politics in the U.S., not much is going to change unless the general public comes to some kind of mass, collective epiphany.
Unfortunately, according to a recent study, it’s not likely…for more on that, check out Krugman’s article yesterday. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Let me first sum up for my dear readers what the proposals entail. Basically, Obama’s biggest cut is to be achieved by freezing non-security discretionary spending for 5 years. This means cutting money for programs like the SEC, which oversees the financial industry (gee, I wonder why that could be important?), as well as other programs that improve our environment, support education, etc. The most heinous cuts Obama makes are the ones that reduce help for poor families paying to heat their homes during the winter months, as well as cuts in Medicare payout to doctors, and beginning interest on federal Pell student loans for undergrad and grad students before they graduate.
As usual, this isn’t enough for Republicans, who want to cut every educational, environmental, and social program on the books, while preserving tax breaks for big oil and refusing to make any cuts to the military, even when military leadership has recommended that certain procurements be curtailed because they are obsolete. Somehow those pork projects aren’t the kinds they want to cut, especially when the manufacturing plants are in their district, as is the case with Speaker of the House, John Boehner.
The problem is, neither party is willing to make the cuts necessary to balance the budget, nor are they willing to make the investments that will make our economy more efficient, streamlined, and productive.
The military is a huge portion of the budget, and it is by far the most inefficient spending we engage in as a nation. None of the weapons we build, whether they be plane, ship, bomb, or gun, will ever have a secondary contribution to our economy. In other words, we pay to build things that don’t do anything for us. And then there’s the issue of maintaining a massive standing army—for what? So Republican presidents have the ability to get us in foreign wars that are purposeless? Look, we can all agree that it is necessary to have some kind of military, especially in this day an age, an elite Air Force and Navy, but we are far beyond spending what is necessary for our defense.
Keep in mind, the budget for defense is on the same scale as Medicare and Social Security. But whereas the money we spend on the military, by and large, goes away, the dollars these programs receive are recycled constantly within the economy. Every Medicare dollar goes toward keeping a person healthy—a person, by the way, that has paid into the system for their entire working life—a person by the way, that may be a grandparent, parent, or the human being reading this column. To boot, every Medicare dollar feeds hospital revenues, pays our doctors and nurses salaries, and trickles into the private market from prescription medicine to the Scooter Store. The same can be said of Social Security. It pays for mortgages, rent, groceries, and Christmas presents; anything really, that can be bought in our consumer marketplace. So while all three programs are a similar size in the federal budget, two act to stimulate the domestic economy on primary, secondary, and tertiary levels; whereas with the military, we only reap the salaries we pay to our soldiers and our manufacturing employees—the rest goes abroad, or sits in corporate bank accounts.
This is known in economics as the "Guns vs. Butter" trade off. Does a government spend its money on the military, or on domestic development? Right now, we are spending far more than justified on "Guns," and it's killing us.
The other thing that seems to be left out of the conversation is that just 2 months ago, Obama and congressional Republicans agreed to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, adding an additional $700 billion to the federal deficit. And now we’re in just dire need to cut funding for Social Security, Medicare, and other programs because the deficit is going to swallow us whole? Give me a break.
What all of this clearly illustrates is that politicians will make the easy choices, like giving their rich buddies a tax cut (a vast majority of our elected officials are millionaires and billionaires, and run in those circles), while refusing to approach political issues that might receive criticism or be uncomfortable, for example: cutting military spending, relaxing federal drug laws, or eliminating tax loop holes for multinational corporations (remember, they deal with lobbyists a whole lot more than the average Joe).
The other problem that people don’t seem to want to address is that the two party system, along with the dynamic of American politics, are fundamentally flawed when it comes to addressing difficult issues and solving long term problems. For one, if a politician attempts to take on a politically powerful entity, say for instance the military industrial complex, they are going to face tremendous attacks from the other party during the next election. In the case of the military, that politician will be called “weak on defense,” “a friend to terror,” and God only knows what else.
Second, Americans tend to vote out the party in power when there is a bad economy, and when people are suffering. Underlying message: its actually good for the opposition to make things as bad as they can be going into the next election—this explains Republican political behavior pretty well since Obama’s election in 2008.
Third, because of the tremendous amount of money in our political system from lobbyists and large corporate interests, politicians have little to gain from looking out for the little guy. Average citizens have neither the time, nor money, to effectively lobby their politicians. Thus, it’s easy for politicians in our system to justify cutting programs like unemployment insurance, welfare, education, and other social programs.
Finally, the news media in this country is inaccurate, biased, and full of propaganda. Obviously, most liberals will point to Fox News here, but even a close read of the supposedly liberal New York Times reveals massive lapses in basic journalistic integrity. Bottom line: Americans don’t know who to believe, so they can’t hold politicians accountable in lockstep—we’re so divided that our vote is largely impotent. Moreover, many Americans simply vote against their best interests, which violates the basic tenet of economics: that people will make rational decisions when they have sufficient information about that decision. Guess what’s missing?
Oh, and about those investments we should be making? It’s been shown that spending money on transportation returns as much as 400% the investment for the economy. We also know that programs like food stamps and unemployment have well over a 150% return on their investment. It’s nice to know that Obama’s budget increases spending on transportation, and withholds cutting food stamps and unemployment. It is even better that it includes increased spending on education, whose value to the economy is immeasurable, being that education is the basis upon which civil and modern society it built. The problem is that Republicans are going to fight with our President tooth and nail to cut them all significantly.
Additionally, we must remember that this is only the federal budget. State budgets across the U.S. are bleeding massively, and the single biggest expense on the chopping block is education. What isn’t being talked about? As usual, prisons. Spending on incarceration represents a huge portion of state spending (10% here in Oregon), and yet there is no talk of relaxing drug laws or prison sentences. If anything, people want there to be more punishment, and longer sentences.
So, to sum up, our collective government, state and federal, refuses to cut military spending, prison spending, or close tax loopholes for wealthy corporations and individuals, preferring instead to cut education, social programs, and oversight to protect consumers. And, given our two party system, and the dynamic of media and politics in the U.S., not much is going to change unless the general public comes to some kind of mass, collective epiphany.
Unfortunately, according to a recent study, it’s not likely…for more on that, check out Krugman’s article yesterday. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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