The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future. Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.
If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)
Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.
In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.
But Republican leaders can’t do that, of course: they refuse to admit that taxes ever need to rise, and they spent much of the last two years screaming “death panels!” in response to even the most modest, sensible efforts to ensure that Medicare dollars are well spent.
And so they had to produce something like Friday’s proposal, a plan that would save remarkably little money but would do a remarkably large amount of harm.
Slicing $100 billion dollars from programs designed to help America's kids and safeguard the future is exactly what the Republicans want to do. They only care about getting political power now, and the worse things get, the louder they complain that government cannot work, and that more cuts are needed...in future programs and programs for kids, of course. Better than cuts we'd have to face now, better to kick the can down the road like everyone before them.
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6 comments:
Busted again this morning. You just don't get it, do you? You're in spitting distance of the unemployment office. Management is well aware and they are not pleased.
Time to ask yourself if you're going to be an employed analyst or an unemployed blogger.
The game's over.
You've been maintaining these threats for HOW long now? Doesn't that get tiring?
If Krugman gave a damn about the future, he'd be for eliminating the corporate tax to make business as profitable as possible.
Or do you think the next world-changing innovation is going to come out of a government welfare program rather than a American corporation?
Because the source of all innovation has been and will always be corporations. Government cannot innovate, just give welfare to those too unworthy to innovate. Thus we need to cut government to make them innovate to survive.
Right. The hopes of basing our economy on "world-changing innovation" is kind of dumb when corporate America is more or less interested in the games of "Wall Street Roulette" and "Main Street Smash-and-Grab".
What we need now isn't "world-changing innovation", it's "jobs". Guess what the private sector isn't giving, even with sweetheart deals they've had. Guess what the government is very good at setting up.
Hell, much of our infrastructure is worn out or could use upgrading. There's jobs right there.
But then, that would require... oh NO! TAXES! THE WORLD WILL END THEY ARE STEALING OUR MONIES TO GIVE TO THE LAZY UNWASHED MASSES. HELP US JEBUS! OH NOES!
So hey. Cutting taxes and services even more, and relying on a dysfunctioning private sector for jobs makes perfect sense!
That is, if you're another asshole demanding we suck more corporate cock.
Shadow - Grow up.
Moving on: Anyone who dismisses the role government played in getting some of the biggest innovations in play is a tool of massive proportions. It was government that built the initial infrastructure of the internet, it was tax money that paid for highways, it was NASA that put people on the moon. You look at the biggest money dynasties in the nation and the majority of them got there with the aid of a sweet contract with the government.
Now that the big players are moving out of the US to China and elsewhere, they don't want to be accountable to the people that helped make them as wealthy as they are. Jesus, there isn't enough fire in Hell for these dirt bags.
Oh hey Abanterer, thank you. You brought up the point (and much better than I would have, I might add) that I kind of forgot to make in that little rant of mine.
So yeah, it's not like the government is bereft of world-changing innovations either.
But hey, more suck more corporate cock. Amirite?
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