Are Republicans and new Tea Party members of the U.S. Congress just caving in to the status quo? Will they shut down the U.S. Government by not approving an increase in the debt limit this March over a paltry $100 billion in spending cuts to the current year and the next fiscal year?
President Obama presented a lame 2011-2012 Budget proposal – in keeping with his lame responses to most everything that has occurred since he took office. “Lame” is used in the sense that he really can’t take a stand on anything and that he’ll compromise before an opposition position is even voiced. He is best described by a last-century critique by Secretary of the Navy and later President Teddy Roosevelt of then President William McKinley as having “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”
The majority of the liberal left lost its collective “cojones” years ago. Many of their Democratic political leaders are simply craven, corrupt, paid representatives of our oligarchy. At lease Republicans never pretended to represent anyone else but the oligarchy. Most Americans have yet to figure out this simple fact. The U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Citizens United only confirmed that we lost our country and we’re not likely to get it back until after its complete bankruptcy. The silly politically-correct left will be more outraged by the link between President Obama and a “chocolate” éclair. (So much for seeing the pastries from the bakery as they are wholly unable to distinguish the trivial from the important.)
Some people have opted to demand small government in response to completely corrupt government which is not a solution but rather a complete surrender to oligarchy. The U.S. is having a national meltdown and it’s going to get much uglier as things worsen exponentially for most Americans over the next 10 years.
When the Republicans temporarily shut down the U.S. government at the time they controlled both Houses of Congress in 1995, they included in their attacks some of the largest components of the Federal Deficit: Medicare reimbursements. Today, they are merely targeting some of the $500 billion in discretionary domestic spending while completely ignoring the 88% of the Federal Budget that consists of wasteful spending on the Military, Homeland Security, and the neo-Ponzi-schemes of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
If the majority of conservatives have core ideologies that seriously question all Federal programs beyond national defense, then this is probably the best time to actually put them into effect – regardless of how mindless, silly, wrong-headed, or destructive some of them may be in reality. The majority of willfully ignorant and congenitally stupid Americans really need to see concrete evidence of national failure before they might understand reality. The Republicans and Tea Partiers have that special opportunity to educate many American people in ways progressives simply can’t because few people listen to Democrats anymore.
Actions speak far louder and words – and this is the time to act on the results of the November 2010 mid-term elections. Republicans claim they have a clear mandate from the American people to seriously slash spending. Damn reality, current low interest rates, rising China Inc., and even the best long-term interests of the nation. We may have to destroy the country in order to save it.
Despite pundit claims that Congressional Republicans failed in their 1995 efforts and were politically punished, the re-election of President Clinton in 1996 was due to an improving economy and a really weak Republican opponent. Furthermore, Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress until 2006 – another 11 years. So much for stiff electorate punishment. Democrats couldn’t hold onto a majority in Congress for more than four years – so who’s being punished in a center-right nation? Republicans stand to increase their Congressional power and recapture the White House in 2012 with a long government shut-down and more bad economic news for the next 2 years.
A plurality of the U.S. electorate believes that most everything that has gone wrong with the country during the past 20 years is principally the fault of Democrats, socialists and “Libruls.” This might not be true but in a land of complete denial, facts don’t mean anything in our political and economic policies.
Some Americans may separately fault large U.S. multi-national businesses and Wall Street financial institutions for some national problems. But the Democratic Party has willingly become so intertwined with and the ostensible front for those entities that long-standing Republican support for these private institutions of mass economic destruction has been forgotten. In addition, Al Gore has been, is and will be personally to blame for all bad weather and climatic anomalies around the globe. If one tells big lies constantly and loudly enough, they will be believed by the majority of voters.
What Republicans and Tea Partiers have failed to do is go far enough down their road toward nihilism that all “government is bad.” Actions speak far louder than words. The collective results of many polls and the 2010 elections might be that many Americans want action – regardless of its sanity or usefulness in addressing the myriad of problems facing the nation.
Why not just eliminate all Federal discretionary domestic spending? Not just freezing or cutting the EPA, transportation funding, scientific research, school lunch subsidies, the FDA, The Justice Department, Air Traffic Control, Amtrak, and a myriad of federal programs – but just doing away with them completely? Let’s make Washington DC a ghost town.
Taking some food and medical care from some poor infants and pregnant women is just not stern or extreme enough – eliminating it completely for all of them would be “fair” in a fiendish and convoluted way. There is a purity and simplicity to this approach that would appeal to many conservatives and their media personalities. Perhaps the Federal Government needs a massive dose of zero-based budgeting but such discipline cannot be imposed upon defense spending because of…oh, whatever.
All Federal Departments, Agencies, Commissions and ancillary oversight and regulatory programs should arguably be eliminated. Possibly the only things that could be retained are annual operating funds for Congress, a very small White House Staff, the Supreme Court and some of the Department of Treasury and Internal Revenue Service that would limit its audits to wealthy Democrats, “Libruls,” Union Members and University Professors. (The Federal Reserve is autonomous and is fully funded by its large member banks.) Everything else is really superfluous to the sole job of the Federal Government: national defense and the aura of security from terrorism – internal and external. Any other federal government work deemed essential for appearance purposes could easily be outsourced to Mumbai, India for about 10% of the current cost of expensive federal workers.
If some of the extinguished federal programs are so important to some private enterprises, states, or a sizeable number of American people, then a private-sector or state-level solution should be found. That national crisis might foster some business and individual ingenuity – and get all those unemployed and under-employed people off their lazy duffs. If an activity can’t make obscene profits, it doesn’t deserve to exist – and that would apply to people as well.
Some nit-pickers might point out that even if all federal discretionary domestic spending were eliminated, the proposed 2011-2012 Federal Budget Deficit would still exceed $1 trillion. Picky, picky, picky. We could celebrate the elimination of one-third of the massive annual debt by passing a few more tax cuts – mostly for the wealthy oligarchs who pay for re-elections. Besides, over a 10-year period, we could claim to reduce the deficit by $5 trillion dollars. (This always sounds better in the present even if those savings never materialize in the future.)
Just as long as the interest is paid on the federal debt obligations and those outstanding Treasury Bonds are continuously rolled over, our domestic ruling oligarchy will be content and so will be our large foreign creditors, including China, Japan and those who sell us oil. Eliminating all discretionary domestic spending would make those payments even more secure. Besides, those programs would have to be terminated by any third-world nation when asking for an IMF bailout – and we’re just postponing that eventuality a bit longer.
These wealthy and powerful interests (banks, insurance companies, investment firms and various foreign nations) who own our Federal Debt and control our federal and state governments don’t care if 80% of U.S. citizens end up being serfs in a neo-feudalistic system. The bottom half of American households don’t even pay income taxes because their incomes are simply too small to make any difference. Their continued existences are equally irrelevant since they are not part of the wealthy U.S. oligarchy and celebrity class – and they are certainly not the principle tax sources to make those $500 billion annual interest payments. We really don’t pay the interest out of taxes – we just borrow more to cover them.
The extreme deficit hawks are engaged in is a massive deception. No one in the leadership of our political or economic systems is willing to tell the truth to Americans. Taxes will never be raised on our oligarchy that has uncoupled itself from the rest of the nation. They simply have too much political influence over our elected officials and they see no benefit propping up a dying empire where the real money is to be made elsewhere on the globe. Continued outsourcing of U.S. jobs will result in more Americans having lower annual incomes that will eliminate them from paying most Federal taxes. High unemployment of the young, old and many in-between regardless of educational attainment and experience will continue to grow and contribute to lower overall tax receipts in perpetuity. The tax base is drastically shrinking and we must match government spending to that much poorer nation that Americans will inhabit from now on.
Our nation cannot maintain advanced-nation levels of government when it will soon be a third-world economic has-been. We are not going to invest in our people, infrastructure or industries of the future. The only solution to permanently lower tax receipts at the Federal, State and local levels is to drastically cut, cut, and further cut spending to match the tax revenues our hollowed-out economy can sustain until its final collapse. It’s a shame that a good chunk of tax revenues and public policy is directed at buying bad private assets and worthless “paper” that were socialized and paying interest up the economic ladder, but life wasn’t meant to be fair.
The only limit on cutting jobs, government programs and the futures of Americans is if people start a violent revolution, which is highly unlikely. The majority of Americans will expand the fighting between each other and blame every conceivable internal minority group, before a few realize that our manipulative wealthy oligarchy (who caused most of the nation’s problems) are simply watching and laughing from a safe distance.
The U.S. oligarchy and their Washington DC political lackeys in both parties can still eliminate quite a bit of government support from the desperate lives of the middle class and poor before they really have to move to Monaco, Singapore, Lichtenstein and Belize for their own safety. They are quickly refocusing their global businesses overseas and what’s left of U.S. operations can also be performed anywhere on the globe.
We are witnessing a national experiment of how much of the wealth and income generated from this economy can be withheld from 80% of people who produce it, and how much can we steal from them before they rise up in protest. So long as they have enough pizza, tacos and beer, new electronic gizmos, 24/7 info-entertainment Media, plenty of prescription and illegal drugs, and football to distract them from reality, they might not notice for quite some time. And if they want take out their frustrations, anger and pain; they will be craftily redirected against each other. That is why the current NFL negotiations between owners and players are so important because without Football next year, Americans have too many guns as an alternative national pastime.
The duty of liberals, democrats and progressives is to do nothing because anything they say or do is meaningless. Even though they will be blamed for the collapse of the American Empire, they should resist any temptations to hold any political office or economic power in the Empire while it goes down – particularly since their efforts will be for naught. Perhaps some future historians writing in Spanish, Chinese, or some merged new language of those two and English, will finally sort out the details of America’s decline and fall, and assess blame correctly. That’s all the “hope and change” Democrats have left – thanks in part to President Obama.
The duty of conservatives, Republicans and Tea-Partiers is to hone their message that a federal government shutdown and immediate termination of all federal domestic discretionary spending will be solely the fault of President Obama and Democrats who stand in the way of a new dawn in America. We can give up $500 billion in domestic spending so long as the social security checks and Medicare reimbursements are made to the powerful elderly voting electorate – whereas the poor, young and non-elderly just don’t matter anymore as long as they can afford new electronic gizmos, Internet access, cheap fast food, and broadcast football and other sports. It’s easy to convince enough ignorant Americans that a setting sun is a rising sun since many of them need a special application on their smart phones to tell them east from west, right from wrong, or shit from shinola.
Submitted 2/18/11 by Marc Pascal who has resumed his happy ranting from Phoenix, Arizona. Vote Republican from now on – let them have complete ownership of the Titanic as it sinks below the waves over the next 10 years. Few people care if they are called immoral, unethical or hypocritical – it’s being labeled a “wuss” or a “wimp” that really hurts.