Spreading the Suffering

[cbayer]

My father's weekly column.

SPREADING THE SUFFERING (3/23)

I have long been a fan of David Brooks. Even though he is far to my right, I find him to be the most reasonable conservative I regularly read. While supporting the basic aims of the Tea Party, he hesitated to applaud their extreme anti-government preoccupation. Brooks also suggested that the governor of Wisconsin went beyond what was reasonable in his effort to destroy the public employees union. However, in a column published in the New York Times a few weeks ago he indicated that Wisconsin’s workers had to realize that in a time of financial crisis everyone had to share the pain—and that included them. Many others had lost their jobs, their homes and theirs hopes, so State employees with secure jobs and decent incomes also had to take it on chin. While that seems reasonable, I wonder if Brooks really believes in shared pain.

When a nation is involved in a war there is plenty of suffering to go around. Not in the two wars in which we currently find ourselves. We have tolerated almost a decade of these undeclared and probably illegal conflicts because the only people suffering are the soldiers and their families. I’m not paying any price and neither are you. More and more the troops are coming from other than the elite levels of American society. Those who are being killed and maimed have largely been recruited from the ranks of young men and women unable to find other jobs. One rarely sees the children of upper economic class families in boot camp. My guess is that if there were a draft, and everyone of a certain age was subject to serve, we would be out of Afghanistan and Iraq in six months.

And who is paying the trillions of dollars it has taken to sustain these adventures? Nobody I know. We have shoved the cost onto the backs of our great-grandchildren. If you want a clue as to one of the significant reasons the present national debt is beyond astronomical proportions, take a look at how much we have had to borrow from China and others to keep troops in the war zones at over one million dollars per soldier per year. Since few of us are suffering from the costs of these wars, we let them go on ad infinitum. And is anyone of us short of gasoline or any other commercial product? If we are suffering I’d like to know our pain’s locale.

David Brooks was not referring to our wars, but to the need for public employees in Wisconsin to share the pain of this devastating economic crunch? The Tea Party wants to cut out of the national budget billions of dollars of human and environmental support so that we sacrificial Americans can help reduce the deficit. What Americans? Those with the greatest need! What about America’s super-rich corporations that are presently sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars they can’t spend? The economic crisis is not caused because the biggies don’t have money to invest, but because consumers don’t have money to buy. Having taken much of their investments overseas, the biggies also evade American taxes. General Electric is a case in point. Last year the GE conglomerate generated $10.3 billion dollars in pre-tax income. How much tax did they pay on this windfall?” ZERO! Anyone suggesting they share the pain of our dismal debt?

The stock market continues to move ahead and its big shareholders are hardly suffering. And while the out of work, out of their houses and out of hope common people do indeed suffer, those who were central in causing the collapse are being paid royally. Last year the top hedge fund managers earned an average of more than 20 million dollars each. And these multi-millionaires were taxed on most of that money at the 15% capital gains rate. We’ll feel better about the notion that the pain of the economic crisis must be shared when super rich corporations and individuals are doing the sharing. And that probably goes for David Brooks, who is doing very well indeed.

Charles Bayer