America Is Burning; Washington Fiddles

And I thought someone told us that we ignore history at our own cost. Presumably that eminent person had no direct acquaintance with the ways of Washington.

So. The problem appears to be that in order to get his own party to sign up to keeping the government open leader Boehner has to add in all sorts of extreme “riders” to the necessary legislation. These riders express the views of the goofball right wingers who are totally indifferent to the consequences of a shutdown. Defunding abortion. Limiting the Environmental Protection Agency. Cutting the flow of money to charities. The stuff of dreams for the libertarian and Tea Party extremists who apparently delight in this orgy of anti-social activity.

Make no mistake: there are enough of these people are kooks, and they really don’t see a problem were the entire government shut down. They are the modern Ayn Rand army. They want us all to revert to a Hobbesian world where brute force and violence determine who the big dogs are. There is nothing new, of course, in advocating a nasty, brutish, and short life for your fellow citizens. They are, after all, not actually your fellows. They are all potential combatants or rivals with whim you scrap as you eke out your living or mastermind your way to the pinnacles of power. Presumably, once we are all set free from the dead hand of evil government, we will thrive no matter how polluted, poverty stricken, sickly or dangerous the world around us becomes. Who needs government when we have the free market and endless weaponry as protection?

That anyone can, in today’s world of complex and intricate connections, call for the shutdown of government is beyond me. They would have to be relentlessly sociopathic. Perhaps they are. In any case there are enough now in our Congress to execute their hair brained scheme. And let’s not forget: this is their second attempt. The modern Republican party is obsessed with being anti-social. But only when there is a Democrat in the White House.

It bears repeating, and goes far too under-reported, that the Republicans have no problem at all with big government as long as they run it. Their two contemporary heroes: Reagan and Bush 2 both oversaw huge increases in government spending and the onset of massive deficits. That was just fine with the extremists. But under a Democrat? Nope. Shut it all down.

Hypocrisy is as common in Washington as salt in seawater.

Besides, the deficit isn’t our biggest economic issue. No way is it top of the heap. Our problems run way deeper. Way, way deeper. Perhaps too deep for the Republicans either to notice or care.

America is strangling itself on inequality. The share of our wealth going to the few at the top is now so large that it is weighing down on growth. By sucking out the benefits of increased productivity and diverting it into the pockets of CEO’s, shareholders, and their coterie of advisors, our elite has chained the economy to a great big lead ball. While the majority flounder in debt in order to keep up with the rising cost of an American lifestyle, the elite frolics unscathed. Indeed it desires even more of a share, and bridles at the prospect of having to give up any of its gains of the last three decades.

This is the story that should be dominating the headlines. Not the foolishness of government shutdown. Not the takeover of our politics by a few extremists that no one can resist. But the recent history of the middle and working classes who have been attacked relentlessly by the Randian policies enacted since 1980. We already know what a libertarian world looks like. Most of our fellow citizens have fallen prey to its disorder and mayhem. The steady erosion of inflation-adjusted wages is the only statistic we need to know. Everything else flows, quite logically and naturally, from that one fact. Our economy has been reconstructed to squeeze the majority so the few can benefit. Successive tax cuts were designed to defund government. The plan was to create a crisis wherein the right wing could make the claim we “cannot” afford government, so we “have to” cut. The plan was to turn a choice – defunding via tax cuts – into an imperative, by deliberately causing deficits to grow even during times of economic growth. The big bonus to the anti-social elite was that when they created the crisis with their inept and intemperate actions they simultaneously exploded the deficit into what appears to be cataclysmic proportions.

So this is their end game.

They have to exploit the chaos they have caused quickly because the recovery will start to heal the numbers, and the deficit will begin to shrink away from its crisis driven levels. If that happens we might, just might, be able to have a sensible budgetary discussion. Since the extremists want to avoid anything remotely sensible – it interferes with their chosen way forward – they have to instigate a political crisis to complement the economic crisis they already set in motion. With voters destabilized and ready to grasp at any solution, they can then, they hope, implement the last part of their program and roll back government to pre-Depression era levels.

But the fertile ground within which this revolutionary program is taking root is not the short term one of confrontation over the shutdown of government, it is the already well tilled soil of social unrest caused by the return to pre-war inequality.

Two of the legs upon which the middle class lifestyle used to rest have been kicked away already: wage growth has been stifled; and reliable retirements have been undermined by the shift from defined benefits to defined contribution plans. Those two together allowed American workers to consume more than they would have to do in the less certain world that preceded them. Now they are gone. The benefit of their absence flowed to shareholders who no longer have to share the fruits of productivity gains or protect the retirement lifestyle of their workers. Without these two supports households will have to look out for themselves and save much more from their already hard squeezed incomes. Consumption will decline and the post-war American lifestyle will go with it.

The third leg supporting that lifestyle is government itself.

It is well known, but perhaps less so than it ought to be, that the primary beneficiaries of government activity are the middle class. Their return on the taxes they pay is enormous. They get the best deal possible. And they are about to lose much of that benefit. It too, enabled consumption by providing an array of services that would have to eat into wages otherwise. And because the rich paid in more in absolute terms the middle class could take out more than it put in. Modern government is very much a middle class structure. That is, until the elite took over in order to kill it off.

The true beauty of the right wing plan is its appeal to the very middle class it seeks to destroy. By wrapping the message within pretty pictures of tax cuts, and by embellishing stories of fictional welfare queens exploiting government programs, the right wing revolutionaries have been able to mobilize the middle class against its own interests. Were they able to pull off a significant attack on the government provided safety net – in the name of fiscal prudence of course – they would accomplish their long held dream of reducing the country back into its pre-war state. The middle class would then shrivel away, and we would be left with the right winger’s nirvana of a plutocracy supported by a massive underclass.

America as we have known it since World War II would disappear.

So the struggle over the shutdown is just the denouement of a three decade long game. Inequality is the yardstick against which we can judge our progress, or our regress.

Regression is in vogue. Get ready for more decline.