Mark said:
... the best way to have control over others, is to make them indebted to you.
Why do you think Obama is giving away so much money?
Dan replied:
I didn't know he was. GWB stole two elections, took a multi-trillion dollar
budget surplus and turned it into a multi-trillion dollar budget deficit, and
he did it all in eight short years with two needless wars in deserts half-way
around the world and by giving billionaires enormous tax breaks. Oh yeah, I
forgot... it's all Obama's fault.
dmb says:
We've seen the same pattern repeat for at least thirty years and the motive
behind it is, basically, to starve the beast. The conservatives have been
working to dismantle FDR's New Deal legacy since it's inception. (Pirsig gives
us the MOQ's reading on this struggle as a conflict between social and
intellectual values, as you likely recall.) So the strategy adopted by Reagan
and used ever since is to explode the deficit to create a financial emergency
so that cuts in "socialist" programs can be justified.
It's really quite simple. Deficits are the result of an imbalance between
revenues and expenditures, between taxing and spending. So the Republicans
simply create deficits by cutting taxes. They love to cut taxes. They've all
taken a pledge to never ever raise taxes. Look up Grover Norquist He's the
pledge leader. Says he doesn't want to shrink the government down to nothing.
He just wants to shrink it down so that it's small enough to drown in the
bathtub. In his analogy, government is an unwanted little kitten, I guess.
Anyway, if budget deficits and surpluses over the last thirty years were
displayed on a graph, you'd be amazed how obvious it is. It's not just a
tendency either. The lines go up and down quite steeply. We went from a record
surplus to a record deficit, from the highest ever to the lowest ever, in just
a few short years. Why? To starve the beast. To shrink the government. To undo
FDR.
The so-called TEA party has adopted a worldview that supports this
beast-starving strategy and we see their influence in the current artificial
crisis over the debt ceiling. Their basic premise is that Obama is a damn
socialist for bailing out the banks and the people are Taxed Enough Already.
(I'm not saying this makes any sense. Just reporting on the tea-baggers.) Their
premise doesn't comport with the fact that taxes haven't been as low as they
are right now in my lifetime and Bush started the bailouts a couple of months
before Obama was elected, but they don't seem to care about that. The elected
politicians who are actually responsible for the current flirtation with
national default are the same one's who insist that the deficit can only be
balanced by spending cuts. They refuse to even consider one dime from the
revenue side, by raising taxes, not even on new corporate jets. Why? Because
the whole point is to starve the beast. And thereby increase the power of
capital.
It has to be said that working class and middle class conservatives have been
recruited to this cause largely by appealing to their racist instincts.
American MOQers who are old enough probably remember Reagan's use of the
mythical "welfare Queen", who supposedly drove a shiny new Cadillac down to the
welfare office to pick up her giant government checks. See, they have regular
folks convinced that taxes are too high and government is too big because those
lazy minority types are living high on the hog. As they see it, big government
MEANS that they have to pay the rent for some freeloader. Nobody is ever very
explicit about this, but I grew up around conservatives and went to a
conservative college and even worked in talk radio for about five years.
Believe me, I've seen it up close and personal and I've watched this ideology
in the news constantly for my entire adult lifetime. And it seems to me that
Pirsig nailed it. It's a neo-Victorian slide backwards, an anti-intellectu
al reactionary movement. They call it freedom but what they're really pushing
is unregulated global capitalism.
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