The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)

In my posts entitled: "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)" and "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)" I set forth an analysis showing that the urgency of the deficit has deliberately been exaggerated, for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to use it as a wedge to decimate all the protection that we have built up, not only from the deprivations of our senior years, but from all the threats that modern technology, if unchecked, subjects us to. Many of these, such as the FDA keep our food and drugs safe, or the EPA which keeps our water and our air from being ever more contaminated, the SEC that keeps our securities safe from rigging (at least when properly funded and properly headed) than it is. I could go on and on, but let me mention a few more such as our schools and libraries, our National Parks, our National monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Or the agencies that are supposed to prevent oil spill disasters, such as the Valdez spill in Alaska, or the more recent one in the Gulf of Mexico. Even our safety in riding an interstate bus depends on Federal Regulation, which the recent fatal bus crash in the Bronx dramatically reminds us.

They all need adequate funding and inadequate funding, which I am afraid is what is happening in the cuts that are quietly being agreed to, will decimate the protections on which we depend.

But let me address the elephants in the room: Social Security and Medicare. If you think the attempt to end Medicare and Social Security is something that Republicans feel is necessary to solve the deficit think again. It has been their goal since at even before the Administration of Ronald Reagan, who before he became President denounced the then incipient passage of Medicare with the following:

We do not want socialized medicine…behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism…We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” He went on to say: “The doctor begins to lose freedoms, it’s like telling a lie. One leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

(Emphasis added)

You can find both the quote and a video of the speech here.

When Reagan became President he became somewhat of a pragmatist and, as far as I can find made no effort to have Medicare repealed. In fact, despite his rhetoric on Social Security where he had scorned Social Security as “as an involuntary, quasi-socialistic example of government running amok” and argued, in a nationally televised 1964 speech for GOP candidate Barry Goldwater, that Social Security should become a "voluntary" program. But as President he made an agreement with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. It raised the payroll tax, it raised the retirement age from 65 to 67 to be phased in by 2027; it required government employees to pay into Social Security for the first time; and beginning in 1984, includes up to one-half of Social Security benefits as taxable income for taxpayers whose adjusted gross income, combined with half their benefits and any tax-exempt interest they may have exceeds $25,000 for a single taxpayer and $32,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly. Benefits received by married taxpayers filing separately are taxable without regard to other income. Appropriates amounts equal to estimated tax liability to the Social Security trust funds. These reforms extended the life of Social Security by many decades.

But this sort of compromise is not one the new inflexible ideologues of the Republican Party are seeking. George W. Bush proposed in 2005 doing away with Social Security and substitute for it private investment accounts. “While the White House has helped convince more than two-thirds of those polled that Social Security is heading for a crisis or possible bankruptcy without change, 56 percent disapprove(d) of his approach…” wrote the Washington Post in March of 2005 The proposal went nowhere.

So it was obvious that the determination to abolish all that had been accomplished by Roosevelt –Social Security; by Lyndon Johnson - Medicare and Medicaid, by their own Richard Nixon –the EPA and all the other programs, e.g. Theodore Roosevelt – Food and Drug Administration or our under funded National Parks the first of which having been created in 1896 under the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant, would, if they have not already been, be either abolished or have their funding severely cut. Rahm Emanuel once said” You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," but here there is a desire not only to take advantage of a crisis, but one that doesn’t really exist, and that to the extent that it does, was deliberately created by them, for the very purpose of finding a rationale, an excuse, to do what the public would not otherwise let them.

In case anyone doubts that even our National Parks and all conservation efforts are under attack, see what the non-partisan Wilderness Society has to say or regarding the arts and NEA funding see Advocate For The Arts.

Every decent program conceived by either party in years past, before the Republican Party became an irresponsible radical party, is endangered.

But before I close, and despite the risks of making this too, long allow me to revert to my last post: “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)” where I quote from the Economist.

I believe this quote is so important that with your indulgence I will repeat it here:

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programs for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is rooted in class.

Yes, the conservative, Economist, is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”

This struck me last Friday night when I listened to the highly respected PBS program Washington Week where in their endeavor to sound non-Partisan, they ended up explaining nothing and made this epical battle over the future of our country sound like a squabble between of playground kids, or as though, or at best, it was a sporting event. Worse of all, when they finally, did concede that great philosophical divides are what drives the power play, they defined it as, “Big government vs. Small Government” which is exactly the way Tea Party members, and indeed Republicans in general, would like to define it, for in polls when the issues are defined that way Republicans win, while if it is defined as specific programs that are endangered, from Medicare, to SS, to our clean air, water, etc. Democrats win. Thus as the Economist points out, we do not have to look for “Fox News” to find a “disparate treatment… rooted in class.”

It is very discouraging that we can not find unbiased reporting on such an important subject even on PBS – or are they too worried about funding from the Republican Congress and Corporate underwriters.

Again in order not to make this unduly long I will, in my next post, “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part IV)” review how they planned, nay, plotted to create this crisis for the very purpose of gutting all these programs.