In his famous essay; What You Can’t Say, Paul Graham explored how we’re restricted by social and moral fashions. Well every since Ronald Reagan looked sincerely into the camera and said pithy little homilies about “smaller government”, you can’t say; “It will be necessary to raise your taxes”. Not even when it’s true.
Thanks, Ron; you broke our country and now our country is broke.
He said; “It’s your money, not the government’s money” and voters said; “Hey, yeah!” And he challenged Gerry Ford in the primary and we all learned about how “government is not the answer, government is the problem!” No thanks, said the Republicans; we’ll give Ford another go. But Ford reminded the country of Nixon, and mister Carter Went To Washington.
And prop 13 passed and California became ungovernable. But for a brief interval between the loss of tax revenue and the collapse of infrastructure, fake prosperity reigned. So Ronnie was a big hero and went on pushing the whole country toward California’s model.
He said; “A government big enough to provide everything you need is big enough to take away everything you have”. A shiver went down our collective spines and we made him President. And tax rates fell and deficits went up and we kept driving on the highways that were built during Eisenhower’s administration, when the maximum rate was above 90%. We forgot all about the aging water and sewer lines, and the bridges, and the grid. And we just let problems like water supply and the reality of climate change wait until some more convenient time. It seemed like prosperity.
Democrats now bore the Scarlett Letters; “Tax And Spend”, as if “Borrow And Spend” were some kind of improvement. And deficits soared and Bush The Elder came in and while no one was minding the store, the banks collapsed. And the government borrowed money to bail them out, and new regulations were put in place, immediately to be drilled full of holes.
Bill Clinton became president and had an affair and Family Values Adulterer Newt Gingrich assailed him on it, and he was impeached and ended his second term in disgrace, leaving our country shamefully at peace with a budget surplus and paying down its debt. And thus began eight more years of Conservative rule in which unexplored heights of deficit spending were attained, civil rights were made suspect in the War On Terror, and tax rates of the super-rich fell to new lows. And for those same eight years everything was Bill Clinton’s fault, the dirty bastard.
But toward the end nobody was minding the store and the banks collapsed and the government stepped in to save them and then blamed it on the new guy, conveniently forgetting that the new guy made the old guy’s program work pretty well, actually, holding off a new Great Depression and saving GM in the bargain. It was (and is) a true emergency and deficit spending makes sense in an emergency even if it was created by someone else. But Conservatives didn’t like the new guy so they made all that deficit spending his fault somehow. Perhaps they want him to be a one-term president so they can blame the next eight years of catastrophe on him.
And during all this time the roads didn’t even have the courtesy to stop getting older, nor the water delivery system, nor the bridges or dams, and the climate didn’t even think to hold off on change-driven drought so that the Oglalla aquifer kept dropping and Hoover Dam is counting the days until they’ll have to turn off the turbines. And nobody mistakes it for prosperity except the super-rich, who have been doing very well indeed.
We’re being had, people. It’s past time to push back against the rhetoric of Saint Ronald. Government is the corporation of the people for the management and protection of the commons. Like any corporation, it can be effective or not depending on the competence of the people we hire to run it. Try to run any company with ideologues and cronies and sweetheart deals, and you’re going to be in trouble fast.
Conservatives preach a kind of prosperity that amounts to growing crops without spending money on fertilizer. It’s like running a trucking firm but not doing scheduled maintenance on the trucks. Sure, you post higher profits for a while, but “What are Conservatives conserving?”
Well the Traditional Family, of course. And fiscal sanity, defined as never deficit-spending on any humanitarian purpose. And corporate welfare, for which we need no better evidence than the three billion dollars that poured into conservative campaigns this midterm. Because when all is said and done, whatever you think the real issues are, ask yourself; did the corporations that donated all that money really care about gay marriage, or gun rights? Or was it more about stopping unemployment benefits, or an end of their monopoly on health care exploitation, or the freedom to keep profiting from the energy status quo as long as possible? As always, the real issue is hiding behind the money. And all those “social conservative” issues are just ideological leverage.
NOTES:
- I have edited the section about Reagan’s challenge to Ford since first posting this essay.
