Collective Conscious

At last (empha­sis mine):

I’m not say­ing that con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans don’t care about poor peo­ple. But they really care about rich peo­ple. So far, the pol­icy agenda they’ve pushed has been a mix­ture of very expen­sive tax cuts for the very wealthy and very deep cuts to a lot of pro­grams that focus on the very poor. It’s … curious.

Think back to the tax deal. The GOP’s demands were: 1) the exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts for high-​​earners; and 2) a mas­sive cut in the estate tax. Put together, the two items will increase the deficit by close to a tril­lion dol­lars over 10 years. If the GOP had wanted, they could’ve used that money for more tax cuts for the poor, or even the mid­dle class. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion would’ve hap­pily signed onto that com­pro­mise. But Repub­li­cans did not want that. If we were going to increase the deficit, we were going to do it on behalf of the wealthy.

Now they’ve moved onto deficit reduc­tion, or at least spend­ing cuts, and their pri­or­i­ties in the 2011 bud­get are telling. Their cuts are com­ing from non-​​defense dis­cre­tionary spend­ing. That’s a cat­e­gory of spend­ing, as you can see here, that tends to focus on ser­vices to the poor, the job­less and chil­dren. Among other cuts, they’ve pro­posed slic­ing more than $1 bil­lion off Head Start, $1.1 bil­lion off the Pub­lic Hous­ing Cap­i­tal Fund, $752 mil­lion from the Spe­cial Sup­ple­men­tal Nutri­tion Pro­gram for Women, Infants and Chil­dren, or WIC, and $5.7 bil­lion from Pell Grants. I could, of course, go on. Democ­rats have tried to widen the cuts out to other cat­e­gories so their impact falls less heav­ily on the dis­ad­van­taged, but so far, Repub­li­cans have refused. If we’re going to cut spend­ing, we’re going to do it on the backs of the poor.

As for the 2012 bud­get, we know Social Secu­rity is being left alone, and we know Med­ic­aid — which is to say, health care for poor peo­ple — is tak­ing a $1 tril­lion cut. If we’re going to reform enti­tle­ments, it seems, we’re going to start with the one that serves the poor.

It’s very dif­fi­cult to argue that these pro­grams are the most waste­ful in the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The Pen­ta­gon is burn­ing through a lot more cash than Head Start. Medicare spends much more for health ser­vices than Med­ic­aid. The mortgage-​​interest tax deduc­tion is regres­sive, as is the deduc­tion for employer-​​based health care, but as of yet, Repub­li­cans haven’t pro­posed reform­ing either. Again, I’m not say­ing Repub­li­cans don’t care about poor peo­ple. But so far, their pol­icy pro­pos­als don’t. And you can’t chalk it up to an appetite for sac­ri­fice, because for all that the GOP is ask­ing from the poor, they’ve fought hard to pro­tect the rich from hav­ing to make any sac­ri­fices. So far, it’s been pro­gram cuts for the poor and tax cuts for the rich. It’s a dis­ap­point­ing set of priorities.

Ezra Klein does an excel­lent job of fairly assess­ing the pri­or­i­ties and poli­cies of both par­ties. He even gives Repub­li­cans more of the ben­e­fit of the doubt than most other left-​​leaning com­men­ta­tors. But it seems that the all-​​out assault on the wel­fare state, mean­ing the care­ful elim­i­na­tion of pro­grams for the elderly, the poor, the sick, the young, and basi­cally every­one who isn’t a rich white male (because remem­ber, they deserve to be sub­si­dized, or Amer­ica will fall to the Com­mu­nists, who are mostly old sick young brown peo­ple), has finally become appar­ent to even the most insu­lated, insider mem­bers of the new media move­ment — Ezra Klein.

So the Repub­li­can Rev­o­lu­tion of 2011 is com­plete. The cul­ture war that they insist on fight­ing is clear and present. The inter­ests of the old, the rich, and the white have taken com­plete con­trol of the Repub­li­can base, and even Ezra can’t find it in his heart to make excuses for them any­more, save for “I’m not say­ing that con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans don’t care about poor peo­ple.” (In other words, except for notably rare exceptions…)

That Ezra has at last come to grasp that the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment is an assas­si­na­tion of the basic moral good­ness of domes­tic Amer­i­can pol­icy, cou­pled with an attempt to build a plu­to­cratic secu­rity state in its place, means that we all to his left are not mere para­noids. Ezra is not even offer­ing a watered-​​down vision of the fears we have been feel­ing since Paul Ryan first released his roadmap over a year ago. His post is a full admit­tance of the extra­or­di­nary insan­ity com­ing from the GOP these days. It is an utter fail­ure of gov­er­nance, an attempt to oblit­er­ate the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of America’s most vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens in order to fund tax breaks for America’s most afflu­ent. If this plan suc­ceeds, it will destroy the state as we know it.

To sub­si­dize the rich at the expense of the poor is the worst pos­si­ble role for the state in the mod­ern world. The ben­e­fits of global cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism have been over­whelm­ingly con­cen­trated in the hands of the few, and while I do believe that they should be enti­tled to a share of the prof­its from the busi­ness explo­sion, it would not have ever been pos­si­ble with­out the sup­port of the Amer­i­can wel­fare state, the mil­lions of mid­dle class wage labor­ers here on Amer­i­can soil who toil day in and day out to make sure that the admin­is­tra­tive work gets done, to make sure that they them­selves do not fall prey to Amer­i­can sick­ness and poverty, or those who work mul­ti­ple jobs, or cut our grass, or teach our kids.

Repub­li­cans want to do away with pub­lic soci­ety. The essence of plu­toc­racy is that it cre­ates an insu­lar sub­so­ci­ety wherein pub­lic ser­vices are no longer needed to sup­port the most pow­er­ful. Pri­vate schools teach Their young, pri­vate invest­ment funds chan­nel Their wealth, pri­vate jets ferry Their asses, pri­va­ti­za­tion fuels Their prof­its. The pub­lic appa­ra­tus is to Them an appen­dix that serves only to empower the mul­ti­tude so that we might reap the ben­e­fits of free enter­prise with­out con­tribut­ing a damn thing to it — They would rather have us all illit­er­ate and une­d­u­cated, forced into depen­dence on Them in a cap­i­tal­ist dystopia.

Pub­lic schools, pub­lic media, pub­lic health care, pub­lic unions; these are the forces of soci­ety that stand for the peo­ple, that use tax dol­lars and com­mon sense to ensure that the Amer­i­can pub­lic has the resources it needs. The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion depends on these ser­vices for every­day life, and the con­ser­v­a­tive coali­tion believes it is finally in the posi­tion to end this state of affairs once and for all. The Mar­ket, They say, will pro­vide bet­ter than the State; but this is true only for Them. The Mar­ket will not pro­vide for us if we can­not access it, if we can­not afford it, if we can­not even bar­gain with it; it is not even free if these things are impossible.

For the masses only the State can pro­vide the coun­ter­vail­ing force against the accu­mu­la­tion of wealth that has occurred in the cap­i­tal­ist class — and we need now to defend it.