[MD] It's all Obama's fault?

[david buchanan]

Mark said:
... the best way to have control over others, is to make them indebted to you.  Why do you think Obama is giving away so much money?


Dan replied:
I didn't know he was. GWB stole two elections, took a multi-trillion dollar budget surplus and turned it into a multi-trillion dollar budget deficit, and he did it all in eight short years with two needless wars in deserts half-way around the world and by giving billionaires enormous tax breaks. Oh yeah, I forgot... it's all Obama's fault.



dmb says:

We've seen the same pattern repeat for at least thirty years and the motive behind it is, basically, to starve the beast. The conservatives have been working to dismantle FDR's New Deal legacy since it's inception. (Pirsig gives us the MOQ's reading on this struggle as a conflict between social and intellectual values, as you likely recall.) So the strategy adopted by Reagan and used ever since is to explode the deficit to create a financial emergency so that cuts in "socialist" programs can be justified. 

It's really quite simple. Deficits are the result of an imbalance between revenues and expenditures, between taxing and spending. So the Republicans simply create deficits by cutting taxes. They love to cut taxes. They've all taken a pledge to never ever raise taxes. Look up Grover Norquist He's the pledge leader. Says he doesn't want to shrink the government down to nothing. He just wants to shrink it down so that it's small enough to drown in the bathtub. In his analogy, government is an unwanted little kitten, I guess. 

Anyway, if budget deficits and surpluses over the last thirty years were displayed on a graph, you'd be amazed how obvious it is. It's not just a tendency either. The lines go up and down quite steeply. We went from a record surplus to a record deficit, from the highest ever to the lowest ever, in just a few short years. Why? To starve the beast. To shrink the government. To undo FDR. 

The so-called TEA party has adopted a worldview that supports this beast-starving strategy and we see their influence in the current artificial crisis over the debt ceiling. Their basic premise is that Obama is a damn socialist for bailing out the banks and the people are Taxed Enough Already. (I'm not saying this makes any sense. Just reporting on the tea-baggers.) Their premise doesn't comport with the fact that taxes haven't been as low as they are right now in my lifetime and Bush started the bailouts a couple of months before Obama was elected, but they don't seem to care about that. The elected politicians who are actually responsible for the current flirtation with national default are the same one's who insist that the deficit can only be balanced by spending cuts. They refuse to even consider one dime from the revenue side, by raising taxes, not even on new corporate jets. Why? Because the whole point is to starve the beast. And thereby increase the power of capital.

It has to be said that working class and middle class conservatives have been recruited to this cause largely by appealing to their racist instincts. American MOQers who are old enough probably remember Reagan's use of the mythical "welfare Queen", who supposedly drove a shiny new Cadillac down to the welfare office to pick up her giant government checks. See, they have regular folks convinced that taxes are too high and government is too big because those lazy minority types are living high on the hog. As they see it, big government MEANS that they have to pay the rent for some freeloader. Nobody is ever very explicit about this, but I grew up around conservatives and went to a conservative college and even worked in talk radio for about five years. Believe me, I've seen it up close and personal and I've watched this ideology in the news constantly for my entire adult lifetime. And it seems to me that Pirsig nailed it. It's a neo-Victorian slide backwards, an anti-intellectual reactionary movement. They call it freedom but what they're really pushing is unregulated global capitalism.