Big deficit = no money for welfare

[khaosworks]

The War at Home

While President Bush pursues the fight against terrorism and the military effort in Iraq, he's also staging a new battle on the home front for his domestic programs. Last week he began by stumping the country for his tax cut plan, a cornerstone of his presidential ambitions. Mr. Bush's successful prosecution of the war in Iraq does not mean that Americans must now fall in line behind his misguided domestic agenda. On almost every front, it is a disaster, a national train wreck that must be headed off for the country's well-being.

From the beginning, the key to Mr. Bush's domestic vision has been massive tax cuts, which Republican ideologues see both as a reward to the well-heeled, and a key to starving the government of money that might be spent on programs like health care or housing. Conservatives once viewed deficits as the height of bad fiscal policy. Now, they embrace them. There is no danger that a government swimming in red ink will come up with new programs to protect the environment, to extend health care for the poor or provide affordable housing to the homeless. No matter how much the president says he wants to improve education, the deficit is an all-purpose excuse to avoid helping public school districts overcome crippling cuts imposed by local governments that are teetering on insolvency.

There was a time when I would chuckle at this kind of opinion as conspiracy theory. But the more you dig into the same reports again and again and the same kinds of allegations - the more names like Bechtel and Haliburton crop up in connection with the Bush administration and what it does, the more his ties to the Christian Right and his almost incessant use of God to justify what he does become more and more prevalent, the more Bush promiseth much but secretly taketh away... then the mind kind of rebels. Surely, if this is true, surely if there is a conspiracy going on here, surely it can't be this obvious.

And yet, is it that obvious? The documentation is out there, thanks to the Internet, yes, but it's buried. You need to work a bit, not much I grant you, but you still got to work to get it unearthed. You need to sit down at the search engines and scour the news media and find the little bits and pieces and put it together, because the mainstream media shure 'nuff ain't gonna put it together for you. Only recently have bits and pieces been leaking out into places like CNN, the New York Times, but mark my words, these will be quietly forgotten and dismissed because people will think, nah, this is too obvious, too paranoid, too transparent a power grab. But perhaps that's what Bush & Co. want you to think.

Consider - deficit spending concentrating on defence, rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq - that benefits the contractors who get lucrative contracts. Lower taxes - benefits the rich, but leaves no money for public programs and federal subsidies, which means the poor who get their tax cut have to spend more proportionately on basic needs, while the rich hardly feel the dent since they're already paying private anyway. No money for low cost housing places people at the mercy of slumlords. No money for schools and school vouchers mean essentially subsidizing private, religious (read Christian) schools. No money for Medicare means paying more to the HMOs. And the Republican, big business, economic elite, deregulated economy, anti-welfare, Christian Right agenda gets pushed forward. I don't think this agenda is evil. But I do think that it's wrongheaded and harmful to a lot of people.

Too loony? I used to think Cynthia McKinney was a complete loon, too. Now, I'm not so sure. My only hope is that more people start waking up to what's going on and start thinking the unthinkable.

Comments

[camwyn]

Back when the war had just barely started, I got an email from my penpal in mainland China. He wanted to know why Bush was going to war when there were so many domestic problems he hadn't solved. The only thing I could think to tell him was that it's easier to keep down a population that's in a continuous state of war or revolt, and that it was easier to start a war overseas than to get one under way here.

Unfortunately, stuff like this makes me think I was probably right. Goddamn it.