Game Over

Let the new game begin!

You may have missed this weekend’s news. Here is the short version: the Republican party does not think there is a fiscal crisis. No. Not at all. What crisis there is resides well off in the future. So all those panics, fiscal cliffs, sequester debates, and assorted other dire emergencies of the last two years were not, I repeat not, about the deficit or the national debt. No. Not at all.

So said Speaker Boehner on television this weekend. As did Paul Ryan, he of the many emergency, deficit reducing budgets.

Ummm.

What do we make of this?

Well there’s no surprise. The Republicans have never been truly worried about either the debt or the deficit. Those issues were simply useful totems to rally public opinion around. Ever since Reagan, the GOP has been the less fiscally correct of the two major parties. It has indulged in both peacetime and wartime debt accumulation and, for all its anti-big government rhetoric, has acted to bulk up government spending – George W Bush’s extraordinary giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry on behalf of Medicare being the most recent example. Indeed a goodly percentage in the run up of government spending in recent decades has been the result of policies advocated by supposedly small government republican presidents. The facts are clear: the Republicans at the Federal level are not fiscally conservative. Remember Dick Cheney and his comment about deficits being of no concern?

Something has changed.

Now the truth is public. It isn’t debt reduction that drives the Republicans. It is government itself. They are getting perilously close to announcing what we all knew: yes, they really do want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want to abolish all forms of government insurance coverage of the elderly and the sick. they’d love to get rid of all of it except the military, which miraculously doesn’t count as government spending in GOP minds. So different is it that latest Ryan plan actually piles on more defense spending as it slashes everything else. You can never have enough generals it seems, but there always schools, roads, and hospitals to close.

The Republican problem is, of course, that being too public about this aim is not a very good electoral message. Voters love those programs. Hence the dissembling over the last few decades. Yet, as the GOP became more and more right wing, its purists became more emboldened. They became less and less inclined to hide their real intentions. They fought furiously all efforts to extend government insurance and insisted at every turn that it was those social programs that represented a dire threat to our fiscal health, not unfunded wars. Thus the incessant call to cut those programs. Thus the persistent resistance to fund them. Thus the torrent of alternatives from privatization to the current favorite of vouchers. While all the battles were fought under the rubric of deficit reduction, the real goal was to eliminate the safety net.

At last the lying is over. Now the battle is out in the open. And voters have a clear choice.

This is not about debt or deficits. Those issues can be dealt with in time and with the return to healthy economic growth. No. The next phase of war – over the federal budget – is about whether we keep the safety net, or whether we get rid of it.

In that context, here’s a quick question for all of you.

Would you prefer the government to guarantee your retirement and health care, as it now does, or would you like to rely on Wall Street? You know Wall Street, don’t you? The epicenter of the recent fiscal crisis. The home of those wonderfully socially aware mega-banks and those mega-bonuses. Just think: those CEO bonuses are coming straight from your retirement account. How nice of you to contribute. And what do you get in return? Risk. Lots of risk.

Having successfully made your private sector pensions riskier, they now want to get rid of the less risky part too. But at least you’d be free of the dead hand of government. And the banks would rake in fantastic fees.

What could be better than that?

You poorer. The banks richer. Sounds like a plan. No?

Well, it may not be your plan. But it is the Republican’s plan.