There Are No Moderates
Can we just all get over this.
I am sick and tired of the media breathlessly reporting every word of supposed moderates in Congress. It is an astonishing oddity that these self-proclaimed middle of the road nonentities can get so much attention. They are simply annoying.
Take the ‘Gang of Six’ who exploded onto the scene last week. Their notoriety comes from their ‘moderate’ suggestion that we delay working on health care until the government’s budgetary situation becomes clearer. How very ‘reasonable’. How very ‘centrist’.
My father used to have words for people like these, and none of them can I use here.
Suffice to say that there is nothing either reasonable nor centrist about these six senators. Their obvious objective is to delay health care reform in order to kill it off. There is nothing unknown about the government’s fiscal condition: it sucks. There is a sea of red ink as far as anyone who cares to do the analysis can see. And the situation is getting much worse.
In fact the US government’s fiscal balance is truly awful and needs radical surgery.
There I said it: we need fiscal reform.
So are the ‘centrists’ just being ‘cautious’ and ‘reasonable’ in calling for a ‘sensible’ hiatus while we get to grips with the budget?
Not on your nellie.
In fact they are being extremely duplicitous, and if not that, simply stupid.
During the First World War a famous French general is reputed to have urged all out attack despite the very obvious fact that his army was in full retreat and total disarray. The quote goes something like this”Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.”.
Now that’s bold. And it worked. Even a catastrophic problem can be averted by decisive, bold action, focused clearly on the center of that problem. We need health care reform because our current system is outrageously costly, fails to deliver health care to tens of millions of people, undermines wage growth, and ultimately is eroding the fabric of our economy. No analysis shows our current path to be sustainable. Something has to give. Marshal Foch would order an attack. That’s what Obama is – kind of – doing also.
Enter the Gang of Six who are advocating exactly the opposite: give in before the battle has been fought for fear of taking a little damage along the way.
But, and here’s the sneaky part, they are taking this position in order to kill reform, not to support it. This is clear from the simple fact that four of the six were ardent supporters of the notorious Bush tax cuts that are the predominant cause of our fiscal problems today. Anyone who supported Bush’s lunacy lost forever the ability to argue in favor of fiscal prudence: his policy was a recipe for fiscal disaster from the get go. Everyone knew it at the time. Senators like Susan Collins, who aggravates me more than most, hid behind the very thin veil of ‘trickle down’ economics in order to vote in favor of Bush’s reckless effort to destroy the Federal government’s finances.
Lest you think I am indulging in hyperbole about Bush’s intentions: recall that it was the mantra of right wingers back then to talk of ‘starving the beast’. Grover Norquist, the shady leader of the GOP think tank efforts in those days, used those exact words frequently. As did other right wingers.
Susan Collins and the others knew precisely what they were voting for: the crippling of government revenues.
Their position was a logical extension of the hateful Reagan intonement: government is the problem. Ergo kill it off by starving it of revenues.
Why were they so urgent in their desire to neuter the federal government?
Fast forward to last week: there are the Gang of Six proclaiming their ‘caution’: they argue that we need to get our budget sorted out before we talk of health care reform. The beast has been sufficiently starved that it cannot be used to solve this problem. Which is exactly the objective the extreme right wingers had in mind with their starvation policy: cripple the progressive agenda by creating a faux fiscal crisis in advance of any potential reform efforts. The New Deal cost money, if there is no money there is no addition to the New Deal. Simple.
In other words Bush and the extremists like Norquist will win – if the Gang of Six prevail.
And Collins and her fellow travelers have the gall both to enable the Bush victory and then to stand up as if they are innocent and use the very ‘starvation’ that they helped foist on us as the reason that we cannot afford to get decent health care for millions of Americans.
In simple language: the current fiscal mess is caused by these things:
- The Bush tax cuts, that cost us trillions of revenues permanently
- The recession, that has cost us hundreds of billions temporarily through lost tax revenues, and which will come back as soon as the economy recovers … so no loss long term
- The costs of the bail outs and stimulus, which have piled up debt whose interest we need to pay for and then whose face amount we need to repay
Of these the Bush tax cuts will eventually be the largest.
According to the now infamous Congressional Budget Office report the cost of health care reform is less than the cost of the Bush tax cuts.
So anyone who supported Bush has no problem with deficits as far as the eye can see. In fact they like them.
In which case the cost of health care reform shouldn’t worry them one jot.
That it does is a reflection of their innate conservatism, and their strong objection to reform.
Beware conservatives dressed in moderate’s clothing. They are always peddling that sensible sounding smooth ‘pragmatic’ elixir. And it always turns out to be poison.
Susan Collins and her buddies are liars and should be exposed as such.
As I said: there are no moderates.
