Day of Reckoning

Paul Krugman writes in his NY Times op-ed that the Republicans have achieved their goal, but it isn't clear what they are going to do with their "victory":

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Go read his article to find out where he thinks the victorious Republicans will now go. (I think his analysis is right, so go find out what is in store for you!)

I can't believe that the American public continues to be suckered by the Republicans. When I read Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna I got to revisit the insanity of Republican politics of the late 1940s/early 1950s (the McCarthy era finding "commies" under every bed and destroying so many innocent lives). I remember the insanity of Goldwater in the mid-1960s advocating along with bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone-Age Curtis LeMay that nuclear weapons be used in Vietnam. I remember the sleaze of Nixon winning power by lying about a "secret peace plan" and then the abuse of power that led to Watergate. I remember the Reagan years with their destruction of unions and the insanity of the big budget Star Wars program (which still doesn't work). I remember the 1990s with Newt Gingrich bringing government to a standstill and the cynical politics of impeaching Clinton for the same sexual misconduct that was (and is) rife among all the big shots in Washington. And I remember the cynical wars that Bush started in the 2000s along with his big tax cut for the rich (knowing full well that Lyndon Johnson's failure to raise taxes and follow a "guns & butter" approach led to the horrible inflation of the 1970s). Ugly stuff. But still a large number of Americans support this morally bankrupt party, a party started by reformers who wanted to free the slaves but now is an anti-Black, anti-poor, rich man's club that cynically manipulates religious fundamentalists in order to win election after election (e.g. read this book).