SALON Wednesday, Dec 11, 2013 08:43 AM PST Voucher-mania: Why the right is diseased (and out of ideas) Conservatives have exactly one answer for all spending questions -- and it has little to do with serious economics _Michael Lind_ (http://www.salon.com/writer/michael_lind/) In the second decade of the 21st century, the American right has only two economic ideas. When it comes to revenues, conservatives want further tax cuts for the rich. When it comes to spending, conservatives want to replace public programs with vouchers. “Vouchermania” may be the term used by future historians to describe the puzzling rage for vouchers that has swept the right wing in the last few decades. You got a problem? I got a voucher. Education? The right wants to give people vouchers to buy K-12 schooling from private schools, or, failing complete privatization, from charter schools. Healthcare? The right wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with vouchers to let people shop for health insurance or healthcare in a deregulated healthcare marketplace. Retirement? The right wants to privatize Social Security, replacing it with tax-favored individual contributions to private retirement savings accounts — a de facto voucher system. The environment? Cap-and-trade, now demonized by conservatives, originated as a pro-market alternative to direct regulation of greenhouse gases. So far conservatives haven’t proposed voucherizing the Pentagon, but it is probably only a matter of time before some ambitious young right-wing intellectual devises a scheme of personal defense vouchers, which individuals could choose to spend on U.S. military services, foreign armies and navies, mercenary gangs or, perhaps, to bribe the enemy into sparing him or her. What accounts for this conservative obsession with vouchers? Right-wing vouchermania, I would argue, has more to do with politics than with serious economics or policy analysis. Today’s American right is an uneasy coalition among libertarian plutocrats and working-class and middle-class whites who depend on Social Security and Medicare and can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools. The need to win white middle American votes means that the right can’ t simply promise to abolish public services, leaving the mass of Republican voters on their own. In order to be electable, conservatives have to abandon pure libertarian principle and accept the idea of vouchers funded by taxation — even though this is really just “voucher socialism,” as hardcore libertarians sometimes point out. But this doesn’t necessarily harm the right-plutocrats, particularly if they can invest in health insurance, private schooling or retirement savings companies that can vacuum up voucher money. ____________________________________ -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
