republican cynicism and your future

            I’ve written, in a couple of previous blogs, about what strikes me as the deeply ingrained cynicism of the Republican party.  In part that manifests itself in Republican party policy positions that fly in the face of fact (global warming isn’t happening, for example, or my favorite, tax cuts increase federal revenues), or pointedly ignore the best interests of the majority of America’s citizens in order to pass a litmus test required by the party’s most extreme elements.

            In equal parts, it manifests itself in reflexive rejection of anything proposed by President Obama or the Democratic party, even things Republicans supported when they were in power (GOP opposition to the war in Aghanistan that its leaders started comes to mind).  Who after all can forget Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pronouncement that the party’s “primary objective” was to insure that Obama became a “one term president.”

            With their newly won majority in the House of Representatives, and their increased power in various state governments, that cynicism and preference for party over country is sliding out from beneath the rocks that were hiding it during the first two years of Obama’s presidency.

            The examples are legion, but let me toss out just a couple.  John Boehner, the perennially dapper, if somewhat orange, newly minted Speaker of the House held a press conference in Washington Tuesday. This exchange between reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell and the Speaker was part of it.  Caldwell’s questions were in reference to the 100 billion dollars the Republican House leadership was about to propose be cut from the budget Obama had originally submitted (which was never passed), 61 billion of which would be cuts taken from agency budgets already in place—a near 40% reduction.

            Caldwell: Do you have any sort of estimate on how many jobs will be lost through this?

            Boehner: Since President Obama has taken office the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it.

            Caldwell: Do you have any estimate of how many will?  And won’t that negatively impact the economy?

            Boehner: I do not.

At which point, he moved on to the next questioner.

            Think about that for a second.  Over 9% of Americans are currently out of work and at least half of that number have been without work for 6 months or more.  If you’re among that 9%, you know the pain it causes—economically to be sure, but socially, psychologically and emotionally just as much.  If you’re fortunate enough not to be in that number, and you have any shred of human feeling in you, you can certainly imagine the pain.  Boehner’s attitude? “So be it.”

            Equally telling in that exchange is Boehner’s curt, “I do not.”  He and his party are about to propose draconian cuts that could potentially impact jobs in a horribly negative manner, and Boehner does not consider finding out how many jobs might be lost something he ought to at least have checked on?  What possible explanation could there be for that other than “Ideology must be served (cutting budgets is close to Godliness), please don’t trouble me with facts.”

            And the thing is, you don’t have to dig very deep to find the facts.  Just using standard multipliers, the Center for American Progress calculated last week that just the cuts the Republicans are proposing for the remainder of this fiscal year—the 61 billion—would result in the loss of  at least 650,000 government jobs (state, federal, municipal—a substantial number of whom are doing insiginificant  jobs like regulating BP, teaching your children, policing your streets and protecting your home from fire).  In addition, the Center calculated another 350,000 jobs would disappear as the result of the 650,000 who lost their jobs and could no longer afford to buy things, travel, etc.  Put those two together and Boehner was saying “So be it” to a million people losing their livelihood so his party could satisfy its Tea Party fringe.  Perhaps that’s why Boehner preferred to say “I do not.”

            Lest you get the idea that Republican cynicism only exists inside the beltway, consider the great state of Texas, controlled for the past 8 years by a Republican governor and Republican legislature.  Texas currently ranks 47^th in the nation in literacy, 49^th in verbal SAT scores and 46^th in math scores.  Not surprising perhaps in a state whose education powers-that-be recently mandated history texts that devoted more pages to Ronald Reagan than to Thomas Jefferson, but pretty dismal even Texans would have to admit.

            Despite that, Governor Rick Perry—that famous secessionist—took 3.2 billion dollars from the original stimulus package that was earmarked for education and spent it to plug other holes in his budget.  Education saw barely a dime of that money.  He’s also currently refusing  Washington’s latest offer of 830 million in education aid because he’s miffed that Texas’ senators in Congress put language in the offer requiring that this time the money could only be used for education.  The governor of Texas is turning down money to support education in a state that clearly needs all the help it can get, because--now follow me on this--those nasty people in Washington tied the money up so he couldn't accept it for education, then use it for, I don't know, offsetting a tax break he gave an oil company that supported his campaign.  Who suffers? Nobody important in the Republican scheme of things--just a few hundred thousand school kids whose teachers got laid off for lack of funding.

            Keep in mind that Texas has the highest birth rate in the country, which, if it continues at its current level, means that in a decade or so, 10% of American children attending school will be attending a Texas school.  Put in scarier terms, if both birth rate and commitment to education remain as they are under current Republican rule, 10% of American youth will be 47^th in literacy, 49^th in verbal SAT scores and 46^th in math scores.

            Ah, you say, but one way of minimizing that problem would simply be to lower Texas birth rates.  Good point, except for one thing.  Catering to Republican ideology, Texas is religiously (I use that word deliberately) devoted to abstinence-only sex education.  How devoted?  Well, one of the little known features of the recent health reform bill was that it contained money to help states fund sex education programs.  It did that on the theory that better sex education would result in fewer teen-age pregnancies and concomitantly lower medical costs for mother and child.  Senator Orin Hatch, frightened mightily by the defeat his fellow Republican congressman from Utah suffered at the hands of the Tea Party, earmarked 250 million dollars of that money for abstinence –only programs.  Governor Perry gobbled Texas’ share of that money up, but refused an even larger amount that would have had to be used for “evidence-based” programs—i.e. , programs that have been demonstrated to actually work.

            That led to this exchange between Perry and Evan Smith, a reporter for the Texas Tribune, in a television interview.

            Perry: Abstinence works.

            Smith: But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country.

            Perry: It works.

            Smith: Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?

            Perry: I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life.  Abstinence works.

Well, that certainly settles that.  Since it’s possible not every teen has Perry’s indomitable will, it might be useful to look at the evaluated results of  studies done by the same group (Advocates for Youth) in 6 states.  In California, Maryland and Missouri the conclusion was that abstinence-only programs had no impact on sexual behavior.  Two of the six, Florida and Iowa, showed actual increases in sexual activity where abstinence-only was the single sex education process employed.  Pennsylvania had what were termed “mixed results,” meaning that more teens expressed agreement with the idea that sex should be postponed, but more teens also engaged in sexual activity.

            Another study of 13 abstinence-only programs by the Cochrane Collaboration could not find one that showed an “enduring effect” on teen sexual activity.  A study by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked specifically at 934 high school students (randomly selected) who had gone the full monty with abstinence-only programs and taken the “virginity pledge.”  What it found was that sexual activity among pledgers was just as high as among non-pledgers, and, more disturbing, pledgers were less likely to use protection and thus were more prone to pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease than those who had participated in “evidence-based” programs.

            For Rick Perry and the Texas legislature, those facts are not only inconvenient, they are insignificant.  Why?  “Abstinence works.”  And it is a matter of urgent moment for the Christian right and the Tea Party Republicans, which is of much greater importance than what might be best for Texas teens.

            I’ll finish this by excerpting a fairly lengthy section from Paul Krugman’s Feb. 13^th column in the New York Times.  Now I realize that, for most Republicans, anything Krugman says is anathema because, God forbid, he has a PhD from MIT, is currently a full professor at that elitist bastion, Princeton University, and had the abject audacity to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.  Still, he occasionally says something smart.

            Krugman: “How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

Which brings me back to the Republican dilemma. The new House majority promised to deliver $100 billion in spending cuts — and its members face the prospect of Tea Party primary challenges if they fail to deliver big cuts. Yet the public opposes cuts in programs it likes — and it likes almost everything. What’s a politician to do?

The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future. Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.

If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)

Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-
oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.”

            The question is, under Republican guidance, will it be worth seeing?