Sometime in the early 1980’s, it occurred to me that the country was making a major divergence from its longstanding commitment to the idea that government had a responsibility to aid those on the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder. I suppose that vague uneasiness with the nascent Reagan Revolution and the attendant swing to the right of much of the government was at the heart of my discomfort, but I also had to contend with the cognitive dissonance of a Republican Party that gleefully attached itself to the growing evangelical movement while at the same time began thumbing its collective nose at the middle-class voters who populated and empowered the movement.
As the Reaganites started slashing government services and aid for the poor, the mentally ill and the disenfranchised, it quickly became clear that the greatest country in the world was in the process of turning its back on its most vulnerable citizens. In the ensuing three decades, it’s only gotten worse, now to the point that economic stagnation – or quantifiable decline – of the middle class has become the hallmark of the post-Watergate era.
That the Republican Party has managed to maintain a presence at all with a beleaguered American electorate represents one of the great bait-and-switch schemes ever introduced to a gullible public. Put simply, a party that has turned itself over completely to special interests, major corporate behemoths and a military industrial complex that would have given their own iconic former president Dwight Eisenhower major indigestion, now champions and promotes the interests of a tiny percentage of the electorate. And yet it still snags enough votes to frequently commandeer the White House and even the odd congressional chamber from time to time, all the while swindling the very rubes that put them in office with alarming regularity. Go figure.
What prompts all this angst is the seeming prospect of the Republican Party being willing to bring our country to the brink of economic disaster over its perverse allegiance to a putrid ideology that places the welfare of the richest 1 percent among us above the interests of the entire nation. It’s small comfort to think that the responsibility for what happens amid all this debt-ceiling maneuvering will likely be placed at the GOP doorstep, as any remotely sentient human being can see that all of the compromising on this tepid crapolafest has come from President Obama and the Democrats. If the economic devastation that so many economists and pundits imagine comes true to any degree whatsoever, the irony of the very wealthy being among those hosed by the process is hardly any consolation prize.
Make no mistake about it, this annoying dance between right and left and between a reasonable president and an unyielding House of Representatives illustrates little more than the reality that while both ends of the political spectrum are wretchedly beholden to huge corporate interests and the wealthiest of Americans, the Republican Party has gotten in so deep in this deplorable charade that it can no longer tell when it’s time to at least pretend that it has some concern about the 50 million deluded schmucks who pull the lever for them every four years.
While the notion of “Trickle Down” economics has been thoroughly discredited, the Republicans can’t help but keep subjecting us to something trickling down our legs. The bad news is that it really isn’t economics that is do the trickling. With an Orwellian dedication to the idea of repeating a lie over and over until enough knuckleheads believe it, they instilled this nonsense about tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans somehow being a major economic stimulant, even though the statistical record of same is virtually non-existent.
I remember my first reaction in 2001 when the Bush tax cuts were announced. I had been so thrilled that after government deficits being the order of the day for virtually all of my adult lifetime, the tail end of the Clinton Presidency had actually produced a surplus. And now this Supreme Court-appointed president was cutting taxes, with the preponderance of the impact of the cuts directed at tax brackets that I would never even be allowed to visit on alternate Thursdays.
“What the hell am I getting a tax cut for?” I thought to myself. Little did I realize right away that it was nothing more than the imposition of strict Republican ideology about the alleged economic efficacy of tax cuts, probably heavily leavened with more than a dollop of the “Starve the Beast” subtext that Republicans have brandished now for more than a quarter of a century. The idea there is to so severely curtail government revenues that there would eventually be no money available for the disingenuously labeled entitlement programs that Republicans have vowed to disembowel.
Well, here we are in July of 2011 and if the beast isn’t starving, he’s certainly getting really cranky from hunger pains. I wonder how close to the federal debt ceiling we would be had there been no profligate tax cut in 2001, no pointless Iraq adventure two years later, and maybe even without the home mortgage and banking crisis of 2007 that was brought to us courtesy of a Republican-inspired commitment to deregulation of the banking sector that they so shamelessly service.
In case you are now wondering, the question is begged how anybody making below, let’s say, $100,000 annually could even consider voting against their own best interests by pulling the lever to the right. Ah, that’s where the story takes another turn … and I’ll save it for another day.
- T.S. O’Connell
