I love the way the right is so easily blaming all of our economic woes on the left. Never mind that President Clinton had a balanced budget and was paying down the national debt, which was somewhere between $4 trillion and $5 trillion. Never mind that as soon as Bush got into office he declared this paying down of the debt a surplus and it was our money and he was going to give it back to us. Never mind that these wonderful tax cuts and two unfunded wars, not even included in the budget, turned our $4+ trillion debt into $12 trillion by the time he left office. Never mind that it is the mantra of the Republicans to deregulate business because big business can better regulate itself. Never mind that deregulation was largely responsible for the financial meltdown that nearly brought on another great depression. Never mind that without the bailout (that started under Bush by the way), there would have very likely been another great depression.
All the right can do is immediately blame Obama for all of our financial woes and just about everything else that is wrong with our country. Suddenly they can forget about the $8 trillion in additional debt piled on by the previous administration and now we should be fiscally responsible but don’t take anything from the rich because, I guess, they can’t afford it; oh, and of course they earned it. If people are unemployed it’s not because the rich have gotten richer by sending all of our good-paying jobs overseas and busting our labor unions, it’s because they’re just lazy and don’t want to take two or three minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet.
The Republicans have been trying to get rid of all of the social programs that FDR implemented ever since he got them passed and they have found the perfect way to do it; they will just bankrupt the government and all of those nasty socialistic programs can’t be funded so they will all go away and we will be a country of the super rich and the destitute.
This attitude reminds me a little bit of Scrooge in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”: “Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? Yes, but some would rather die than go there. Well, let them do so then and decrease the excess population.”
I will freely admit that there are those that try, and some succeed, to game the system and live on the dole, but most people just need a social support system from time to time. The greatest expansion of the middle class in this country came from the end of the second world war until the late 1970s when the taxes on the rich were much more onerous then they are now, and lo and behold, plenty of people got rich and plenty of people stayed rich, but it is much easier to control the poor then it is to control the middle class and that is what this is all about: control.
Another thing that helped create a healthy middle class was labor unions but now they are vilified and blamed for our economic woes, too. Thirty-five percent of our workforce used to be union, which was when we had a thriving middle class, but now most of the unions are for people that work for the government; there are very few good-paying union jobs left in the private sector. Just one more nail in the coffin of the middle class. It never ceases to amaze me that the average working class person can listen to the BS spewed out by the Republicans and believe that they ever do anything when they are in office to benefit the little guy. They just now refused to allow tax cuts for you and me unless the poor rich guys got tax cuts, too, and yet they still claim they are going to balance the budget. Tax cuts for the rich have been their only solution to everything since Reagan and his “trickle down economics” theory which was the beginning of what got us in this mess.
I could go on but I’m afraid this may already be too long to print. I welcome any comments about what I have written based on facts, not ideology, but I’m sure there will be more of the latter rather then the former.
Larry Benson
Enumclaw
