A funny thing happened on the way to the White House --David Michael Green

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Murdering_Butter_With_Guns.html

A funny thing happened on the way to the White House in 1981.

Ronald Reagan had been talking throughout the previous year’s campaign about taking a meat-axe to federal taxes (and therefore, also, revenue, but that part somehow never got mentioned), about massively increasing military spending, and about balancing the budget. And doing all at once, no less.

Even a Republican could figure out – if they allowed themselves to – that the numbers couldn’t possibly add up. Indeed, no less a Goppy than Poppy (one George Herbert Walker Bush) referred to this preposterous suite of promises as “voodoo economics”. Er, he did that is, during the primaries, when he was competing with Reagan for the nomination. Once he had lost and was hungering for the newly nice and oh-so wise Saint Ron to offer him the vice-presidency, he all of a sudden became strangely silent on the topic, reminding the rest of us once again what is mankind’s second-oldest profession – a gig very much not unlike the first....When Reagan first went down this path it was so weird that a conspiracy theory of sorts arose. The notion was that Republicans knew they could not possibly go through the front door to successfully kill popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, even if they were willing to risk political suicide to do so. So Reagan’s agenda was a back-door approach, instead. Driving up the debt to completely unsustainable levels, the story went, America would be faced with a series of uncomfortable choices as collectors came demanding their payments. The country could either raise taxes, cut military spending, or slash social programs. The idea was that, of the three, the last of these would seem to the public like the least worst choice. And then conservatives could surreptitiously achieve a long-held goal, best expressed by Grover Norquist, right-wing tax crusader extraordinaire: “I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” By “government”, of course, he means the parts that help people, not the parts that kill people. For the right, those parts are okay. If not beloved.

Perhaps this conspiracy was real all along. Boy Bush has made Reagan look like Leona Helmsley’s accounts-payable supervisor by comparison when it came to deficit spending, managing to borrow more than all other American presidents (that’s 42 of them, if you’re keeping score here), combined. Ouch. That’s a lot of cash, dude. Indeed, about nine trillion bucks or so now on the national credit card, and rapidly rising. Plus, of course, interest. Trust me, you don’t want to be handed the bill for this party of the millennium, and neither do your children (“Excuse me, you did what to us?”).

But even if the alleged conspiracy was actually real, it seems likely to have been a bad bet all along. That is, I don’t think it’s a given that, presented with these three options, Americans would necessarily acquiesce to the destruction of the country’s social safety net, especially the massive cohort of Baby Boomers who are just now approaching the age where their hands are going to be extended outward, palm up. I think that given such a stark choice, something miraculous might occur. Americans might choose to finally give up their empire instead, just as the British did when they could no longer afford to pay for both guns and butter after the two world wars. This conservative plan, if it was ever real, could backfire quite nicely into forcing the country to think seriously about excessive military spending for the first time since World War II, and then perhaps to, in the words of Colin Powell, “cut it off, and then ... kill it”...Right now, it’s a safe guess that the public has only the vaguest notion of the costs and capacities of the American military, especially in any relative sense. Most people probably understand that the United States has the most powerful military in the world, and they support that. On the other hand, they might well be horrified to learn just how expensive that military is, how ridiculously disproportionate it is to the others in the world, and how removed those costs are from any real threat facing the country. In times of plenty – or faux plenty – when your government is giving you tax money back even while it is fighting two wars simultaneously, those questions don’t need to be asked (or at least one can be so deluded into thinking). But those days will soon be gone, and – as they say – payback’s a bitch.

In fact, the current military budget could easily be slashed, because the only reason for its ridiculously bloated proportions is to pursue missions far beyond those Americans would support even during conditions of plenty, let alone when the alternative becomes giving up their expected benefits...If we think about military priorities from the ground up, without any built-in assumptions, and without the necessity of maintaining existing programs on the basis of inertia alone, I don’t think we’d get very far before the public would shout out “enough”, especially if they were faced with the choice of having their Social Security checks bounce in order to instead fund some obscure military objective on behalf of corporate interests in Burkina Faso.......

We want our MTV, and we want our Social Security.

And if we have to sacrifice protecting Chiquita Brands’ exorbitant profits in Guatemala or Colombia to get them, we will.