The Poverty of Reaganism-Bushism

[dajoki]

David Michael Green's blog
The Poverty of Reaganism-Bushism
by David Michael Green | June 20, 2008 - 10:14am
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/15384

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The only thing more amazing about regressive-created deficits to finance bloated and unnecessary government spending is the fact that conservatives have until very recently somehow still prevailed in the political marketing wars sufficiently that Americans saw them as the folks who are most fiscally responsible. Considering the record of our most conservative presidents (and the ideological namesakes in question), this is truly an astonishing feat. Ronald Reagan, who castigated Jimmy Carter in 1980 for economic mismanagement, including excessive deficits, proceeded to quadruple the national debt when he came to office. Anyone could see it coming, too. In fact, George Herbert Walker Bush, when he was fighting Reagan for the nomination that year, called the latter's patently unbalanced economic agenda of military build-up, massive tax cuts and a balanced budget, "voodoo economics". In one of the greatest sell-outs of all history, however, Poppy Bush put his personal interest over our national interest, and become strangely silent on the matter after Reagan put him on the ticket as vice-presidential nominee, opening the way for him to ultimately win the presidency.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by his daddy or Saint Ron, Lil' Bush has turned the greatest budget surplus in American history into the greatest deficit ever. His pals in Congress, always railing about Democratic fiscal irresponsibility, broke every imaginable record for doling out the self-serving pork once they got control of the national piggy bank. The national debt is now well over nine trillion bucks, and fast rising. If Bush's tax cuts (actually tax burden transfers, from the wealthy to the middle class, and from this generation to the next) are renewed, it will be far worse still. If the alternate minimum tax is properly adjusted, even worse yet. And we know about the time-bomb of entitlement benefits for retiring Baby Boomers that will soon hit us. What most Americans don't know is that regressives have spent the last decades using their voodoo economics to raid those funds, in order to help keep the general budget deficits from being even worse, thus turning a time-bomb into a nuclear stockpile, about to explode.

So Reaganism-Bushism Principle Number One is use the people's government to steal everything you can from them. Principle Number Two is to use deficit spending to steal from their children as well. (Can't you just see the commercial: "Why wait, when you can bilk it now?!") Principle Number Three is to destroy as much of the social safety net as you possibly can. After all, some Honest John knuckleheads out there are still going to be fiscally responsible enough to want to pay for what we spend, and if they go looking around for potential tax revenue, guess where they might see a whole lot of it lurking about, untouched? So, welfare programs gotta go. Social Security? Gotta go, though of course you can't just kill middle class programs like you can for the poor, so you have to pretend your privatization plan is a reform to make the program solvent. National healthcare? Yeah, right. And, if you do have to add a prescription drug benefit because of the need to pander to seniors, make sure it's written to line the pockets of Big Pharma and Big Insurance so heavily that their pants fall down around their ankles. Don't worry, they have plenty of servants they can get to pull them back up.

The fourth precept of Reaganism-Bushism is an extension of the first three. Once you've exhausted your exploitation of the folks at home and their children, why stop? Americans are only five percent of the world's population. That leaves a whole world of nice vulnerable people to exploit economically!! And politically. And physically. Can you say "Pinochet"? "The Shah"? "Apartheid"? "Contras"? "Marcos"? And lots more where those good old boys came from. Regressives didn't prop up those bloody dictators because they were great lovers of democracy, or even because of some concern about communist incursions into the 'free' world. They did it because all you had to do was enrich these tinhorns and stroke their egos in order guarantee their assistance in the pillaging of their own people. In Grant's era, or even Hoover's, all plunder was local - or at least mostly. Reagan and Bush have taken the hunt for spoils truly global.

But why stop with people, even 6.5 billion of them? There's an entire landscape to be raped! Doing so with wanton disregard for the consequences is Principle Number Five. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, one of the surprises for people in the West, not to mention many in the East, was the degree of environmental annihilation that had taken place. In the race to seek industrial parity with the West, the cheapest way for the Soviets and their allies to get the job done was to ignore environmental impacts of any sort. So that's just what they did, to devastating consequences. The rest of the world is likely to be having a similar experience pretty soon. Whether it's mountain leveling, or rainforest obliteration, or gargantuan industrialized outdoor cattle toilets, or sticking the planet in the pot and leaving it there on a low boil, the world is beginning to find out what happens when the captains of industry exploit the planet's resources while leaving the 'externalities' for the rest of us to clean up. And what happens when right-wing politicians who are supposed to be regulating them in the public interest instead serve the special interests. Hint: It ain't pretty. When it comes to regressive politics in America today, nothing is sacred, not even the ground you walk upon, the water you drink or the air you breathe.

Finally, Reaganism-Bushism Principle Number Six is that war is not healthy for children and other living things, except rich people getting even richer from it. So be sure to have lots of war. Or, at the very least, lots of spending on war goodies. Right now, the US not only spends more on 'defense' than any other country, it spends more - and it's not even close - than every other country in the world, combined! And there are 195 of them or so, if you're keeping score. And our great national threat is...? Nazi Germany? Nah. Stalin's Soviet Union? Nope. It's a guy with a beard holed up in the mountains of Pakistan, and a few other folks like him. (Or, at least it used to be a few, until we had the bright idea of launching the Al Qaeda Hyperdrive Recruitment Program, aka the Iraq War.) Meanwhile, gee, I don't know. Is it just me, or does this seem like a grossly disproportionate amount of money to spend on privately produced military hardware, especially when our medical, education and infrastructural systems are crumbling at home? I guess it's just all a big coincidence that we spend so much on military hardware while the fat-cats bankrolling regressive politicians are getting rich from the war toys the latter then turn around and purchase from the former....