maybe it's just me

            For as long as I can remember, people have regarded me as at least reasonably bright.  I have a couple of graduate degrees, not that alphabet soup after your name means you can pour pee out of a boot, but still, I have managed some academic achievement.

            Most folks who know me also think I’m a little better rounded than just book smart.  Most think I’m fairly clear-eyed and common-sensical and have at least a modicum of ability to analyze situations in a cogent way.

            I get the political philosophy that says government these days is too big, that it has its hands, so to speak, in too many apple pies.  To an extent, I even agree with that philosophy.

            I get that political conservatism is  dictionary-defined as a movement that elevates the importance of “traditional values” and is systemically resistant to change.  My personal take is that traditional values are too often those that grew out of and function bestl in societal conditions that no longer exist and that intelligent conservatism should, like the rest of us, be looking for values based on and consonant with “traditional values” that are fine tuned for the modern world.  As for change, my take agrees with the bromide that change is the only constant and resistance to it is both counterproductive and ultimately futile.

            I’m willing to debate my decidedly liberal take with any conservative who wishes to disagree with me and I’m willing to concede that there would almost certainly be areas in that debate where I would lose.  But that is assuming the debate was a rational one, a debate that required every hypothesis to be supported by fact, that took nothing on faith, and that operated on the assumption that the only conclusions worth reaching are those supported by facts and logic—a debate, in other words that does not proceed from a made-up-mind that facts will only confuse.

            And perhaps it is the dimness of mind that comes with age, but since about last September it has become harder and harder for me to find even a modest degree of logic, common sense, or anything that would remotely pass for actionable evidence in much of  this country’s politics. Specifically, I cannot for the life of me figure out what Tea Bag politicians are thinking with the policy suggestions they come up with.  More than that, I can’t figure out what the hell people who vote for them are thinking.

            Exhibit A: we are presently trying (with only moderate success) to wind down a war we foolishly started in Iraq, a war that has cost us innumerable lives and several trillion dollars.  At the same time, we are waging a war in Afghanistan for reasons that are at least a good subject for honest debate that has also cost us many, many lives and trillions of dollars.

            Exhibit B: we currently are a nation with over 9% of its working age population not working.  Economists and demographers tell us that number may be too low by as much as half because we don’t have a way to accurately count the people who aren’t counted as unemployed because they’ve stopped looking for work.  Whatever the actual figure is, a good number of the unemployed have been that way for more than 6 months.

            Exhibit C: since 1983, an unbelievable 43% of the new financial wealth created in this country accrued to the wealthiest 1% of its citizens and a whopping 94% of that wealth landed in the bank accounts of the wealthiest 20%.  Put another way, just 6% of the new financial wealth created in this country since the Reagan years has found its way to 80% of the population.  But that’s in raw dollars, what about real income (i.e. disposable income)?  The bottom 80% do fare a little better there—almost 13% of real income growth has gone their way.  Whoopee.  (No nation, by the way, has ever survived with income inequality numbers like ours.  We are currently in the same category as third world unstable nations like Uruguay or Cameroon.)

            Exhibit D: the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009 conducted a comprehensive survery of America’s infrastructure (defined as Aviation, Dams, Drinking and Waste Water, Energy, Hazardous and Solid Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Public Parks and Recreation, Rail, Roads and Bridges, Schools and Transit) an gave it a grade of D.  Moreover, it concluded that measuring projected spending over the next five years on infrastructure against actual cost of bringing it to a grade of C resulted in a spending shortfall of 1.17 trillion dollars.

            Exhibit E: the most expensive health care system in the world lives right here in the U.S. of A.  The U.S. spends more than twice as much (almost three times as much) per capita on health care than Switzerland—and the Swiss are our closest competitors. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, health care in this country weighs in at over 15%.  Most of the rest of the first world countries hold the cost under 10%.  As a final kick in the face, we lead the developed world in infant mortality rates—by a huge margin, and struggle in no better than 5^th in life expectancy.

            And I haven’t even touch Education, Social Security, Green Energy, Defense or similar major problems that need addressing.  What’s my point?  If you listen to the yowls coming from the House of Representatives and virtually all of the conservative media outlets, the only two problems we have right now is a federal budget deficit and taxes that are too high.  Slash the budget deficit, and—wrap your mind around this one, mine can’t get there—slash that deficit while cutting taxes at the same time, and all will be well.

            But OK, assume for a moment that every conservative and every Tea Bagger has overdosed on Milton Friedman and genuinely believes trickle down economics and voodoo economics aren’t the same thing.  Explain to me please how cutting programs that employ people (Americorp, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, education funding, programs like that) won’t increase unemployment and thereby lower tax revenues and thereby make even more cuts necessary if we are going to reduce that devilish budget deficit.

            Explain to me how simply bludgeoning 61 billion dollars out of the remainder of this fiscal year’s budget without touching Medicare or Medicaid and giving only a glancing blow to Defense—taking away school lunches, denying medical care to the underprivileged, eliminating Pell Grants, doing away with the National Endowment for the Arts, virtually eliminating funding for community action programs, and so on and so on—how does that help the country?  It doesn’t put people back to work.  Quite the opposite.  What the Tea Bag Republican party in the House just passed was a budget recommendation that, just in the public sector, would eliminate 650,000 jobs.  Add in the private sector jobs that would be eliminated by the loss of public sector jobs and the figure reaches a million.  “So be it,” says John Boehner.  Worse,  it doesn’t do a thing to deal with Exhibits A through E.  All it does, so far as my limited lights can discern, is slash the funding for 12% of the federal budget by about 40%.

            I hope the answer is no, but I have to ask the question.  Is fulfilling the promise they pulled out of their ass during the election season—cutting 1 billion dollars immediately from the federal budget—is that really better for the country than working with moderate Republicans (I’m convinced they still exist) and Democrats to fine tune (not repeal) health care reform, reduce income inequality, fix infrastructure, pay for and end two wars, and create programs that will put people back to work?

            I’m not inclined to say that the entire Republican freshman House class is stupid, nor I suppose am I saying the people who voted for them are stupid,  but so far both groups are making it easy to argue that case.  Either that, or as I’ve suggested before, the politicians are simply callous and cynical and the voters are so caught up in ideology they can't see past their nose.  Cutting every program that protects or in some way serves the little guy is easy when you’re not one of the little guys and either have no brain or no sense of human decency.  If this were just a Dickensian thing, perhaps it wouldn’t matter that much.  But by focusing entirely on eliminating programs that help the middle and lower classes, and ignoring entirely anything that might actually make the country better, conservatives and Tea Baggers are inviting a future that no American wants to see, or thought they ever would.