In sum, we should challenge the stark economic disparities of our day not just because they challenge our moral sensibilities, but because they pose a direct threat to political equality. ...Jacob Hacker
Our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize. ...Paul Krugman
It took a statement by a former Republican senator, Alan Simpson, to get that kind of a response from Krugman. Simpson admits he's looking forward to a real "bloodbath." Simpson used to be a Republican senator one looked to for a measure of intelligence and balance, even though he tended to shoot his mouth off now and then. But now he's the co-chair of the fiscal commission and he's on a verbal rampage, a wild ego ride.
I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary.
This is what passes for "reasonable" on the right. Paul Krugman explains:
There’s a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they’ve done it before.
Most Americans think "that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what’s necessary. But that was another country."
Not America. Republicans don't want America. They want an oligarchy and they've got it, as Jacob Hacker insists.
... Policies passed in the name of free markets and justified with reference to the sanctity of private property had the effect of creating markets that were mainly in the interests of a narrow economic elite. Efforts to address these inequities were blocked in legislatures highly attentive to business concerns. Where laws promoting social reform were passed, they were thrown out by the courts. Greater economic inequality led to greater political inequality, which in turn led to government policies that reflected the interests of those at the top, worsening or at least hardening class divisions. Swamped by the tides of inequality and insecurity, democracy was giving way to oligarchy—the very concern that the recent dramatic growth in inequality and our present economic crisis have cast in stark relief. ...
...Generations of Americans have worked to equalize citizen voice across lines of income, race, and gender. Today, however, the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally. The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent. Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials, while the advantaged roar with a clarity and consistency that policy-makers readily hear and routinely follow...
... What we have, in short, is a classic story of cumulative advantages—people who have more are being heard more by political leaders, and what government does reflects that.
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EJ Dionne, at the Washington Post, has an upclose view of process of taming the deficit. He starts with Ronald Reagan's caution that "the problem with his administration was that the right hand didn't know what the far right hand was doing."
Something of that sort is happening among conservatives on the supposed urgency of closing the federal budget deficit.
On the near right is the preliminary proposal of the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. It is a deeply conservative document that would make sharp reductions in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while also cutting and flattening income tax rates. As is, it would do a lot of harm, but at least it takes the deficit seriously.
Then there are Republicans in Congress whose top priority is to force through legislation making the Bush-era tax cuts for the best-off Americans permanent, thus expanding the deficit by about $700 billion over the next decade.
So on the one hand, we have to cut, cut, cut because fiscal catastrophe is looming. On the other, we have to make the problem worse by shoveling more money to the rich because . . . taking care of those with tidy incomes is contemporary conservatism's highest purpose.
Chuckle! Meanwhile, we all live in Kansas -- a broad, coast-to-coast Kansas in which voters vote against their own future, against their own self-interest. You can choose whether to chuckle or bang your head against the nearest wall. But that's pretty much all the choice we have by now.
