Your Government in Action

One of my correspondents, from one of my professional associations:

What were you doing this morning at 4:40 AM EST? Well, if you're a member of the House of Representatives, you were voting on one of the biggest spending cuts in our history, a recision package cutting more then $60 billion from the federal budget for the remaining seven months of FY11. Essentially - the House has rolled back the clock and frozen spending at FY08 levels. ....

With both chambers in Congress now on recess for President's Day - the bill will wait for Monday 2/28 for the debate to begin in the Senate. We are in for an epic-debate here folks. The President has threatened a veto of any bill that includes massive cuts like the ones passed by the House, the Speaker of the House has expressed a willingness to allow the government to shut down rather then concede the point...

I thought the Republicans were elected to create jobs, not destroy them?

Let's be clear. This is conservative idealism at its worst. It will eviscerate nearly everything good that the government does. Expect massive job losses around the country, in the states. It will plunge us back into recession, if not depression. Education, infrastructure, all plunged into the past. Medical research, scientific progress, economic development, gone. I'll have to fire nearly everyone working for me, and taking a substantial pay cut, if this goes through.

And anyone who voted for one of these tea-baggers, voted for this.

If you look at a distribution of where the government spends its (our) money, this bill focuses almost exclusively on "discretionary spending" with only token stabs at defense, and no addressing the big kahunas of entitlement programs.

Yes, there is work to be done. Yes, there are things we could do better. But a Grover-Norquist style "kill the government" approach is a straight shot to disaster. Hang on, folks, as we may be undergoing an explosive deceleration in all aspects of our lives.



(Diagram source)

It's not a coincidence that this occurs against a background of the Koch Brothers (you remember the Koch Brothers) and their work behind the Union-busting efforts in Wisconsin. Yes, there are abuses in organized labor. Sure. But a regression to the bad old days of the so called "gilded age" is not the way to go.

To some extent, this was inevitable with the capitulation of American Democracy to the Corporations represented by Citizens United. But you have to hand it to the Republicans: they have mastered the art of having people vote against their own interests to serve the corporate oligarchs. And that sound we hear is the crumbling of our democracy.