"Big government" or better government?

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The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows a 75% disapproval of Congress and a 57% disapproval of the way Obama is handling the economy.  What is even more troubling for the president and his party facing elections next year, is that 55% of respondents would prefer fewer services from smaller government, and an astonishing but slight majority would support Congressman Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with vouchers for the elderly to purchase medical services in the private market. 

The utter failure of the Democrats to defend their party’s achievements and protect popular programs like Social Security and Medicare could not be more dire and disappointing.  As the national debate moves to the right, and what few services the American taxpayers gets for their taxes now facing privatization, how soon we forget what George W Bush chose as his number one priority on which to spend his reelection capital; the privatization of Social Security.

And had Bush succeeded where would we be today?  Holding worthless private pensions downsized by the Wall Street crash?  If Wall Street could con people into buying houses they could not afford and siphon trillions from the poor in the sub-prime bubble, imagine what they could have done with the Social Security Trust fund?

The other startling statistic that tells the even bigger story is the amount of the $13.53 trillion National Debt that the last three Republican Presidents (Bush one and two and Reagan) ran up.  More than twice as much as all the other presidents combined.  Surely this is no accident.  Indeed it is clearly a strategy to transfer public money into private hands and foreclose the possibility of spending on public services, paid for or not.

When Reagan ran up deficits, about which David Stockman his budget director went to the woodshed to take a beating for telling the truth, the strategy to undo the New Deal was implemented.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw it at the time and warned that excessive tax cuts for the rich, combined with massive borrowing, was a deliberate strategy to transfer billions of public money to the Military Industrial Complex. 

This form of right wing socialism he warned, would foreclose discretionary spending on other government services for those in need who had already paid for them.  Moynihan described this raid on the treasury as an additional tax burden for the already overburdened middle class and working American now paying more because the rich were paying less.  Indeed adding insult to injury, the punitive payroll tax was added at the time, taking money from hard-earned wages not profits. 

By creating a deficit, Reaganomics became a double jeopardy for the taxpayer because the burgeoning debt had to be serviced by the same over-burdened taxpayers.  And who owns the debt?  Those responsible for the debt, the wealthy, and banks and foreign institutions who buy our T-bills.  And as the compulsory interest payments become the biggest single item on the federal budget after defense and Medicare, guess who gets to service the debt?   

The Republican debt strategy exploded under George W Bush, whose co-president Dick Cheney famously remarked in a moment of accidental candor, that “deficits don’t matter”.  The 9/11 attack became a perfect excuse for an unprecedented transfer of public funds into private hands and, not just government programs became fair game, but government itself was privatized, in a Fire Sale to crony-capitalist Republican insiders like Halliburton.

When you add up the bill for defense contactors, agribusiness and the $96 billion in tax breaks and royalty free drilling the Republican Congress is giving the oil companies for the next 15 years, you begin to get the picture.  They did not manage to get Social Security last time, but maybe next time.  But perhaps at last they will get their hands on the biggest pot of public money, Medicare. 

That is not to say that already Medicare transfers public money into private hands, but with Ryan’s voucher system, private insurance companies will get the money first and then decide how much they want to trickle down to the poor suckers who paid for healthcare with their taxes.

The only good news for Democrats is how hopelessly bereft the Republican bench is of presidential material.  From the mechanical Mormon to the mad women, they range from bald-faced liars to babbling idiots.  But if a new Ronald Reagan were to emerge from the pack, with sunny optimism and patriotic promises, the country would be swept up into the final embrace of a complete surrender to Reaganomics. 

Evening in America, as the sun sets on the last vestiges of social democracy.  With the taxpayer subsidizing a thriving corporate plutonomy, while the average American struggles to get by on worthless pensions, with unaffordable healthcare and air you can’t breathe, water you can drink and food that makes you obese and diabetic.