An Immodest Proposal

I’m spitting mad about the attacks on Hillary Rosen and the crocodile tears of folks like Rush Limbaugh and others that are trying to say that the war on women is really about evil feminists and real women. You’ll notice that most of this fabrication is coming from right wing men who have a lot to gain by reigniting the Mommy wars. Just follow this link to the WSJ op ed  page and read how the real misogynists are Feminists. There is nothing more disingenuous that the rant that says feminists don’t support women and child rearing in what ever form that takes.  Most feminists would love to see a situation more like Germany where the country actually supports extended parental leave for babies and toddlers and extends training and quality of day care providers and access to nursery school for all types of families.  If this were really about how to do best by our children we would be having a completely different conversation. We would protect them better from abuse and give them and their parents the kind of support they need to be healthy, happy, and well-educated.  This hoopla is only about splitting the women’s vote.

The heart of the argument needs to be aimed squarely back at the folks that are defunding everything from family planning,  Planned Parenthood, Title X, preschools, school lunches, student loans and all things that support a functioning society.  This includes public health and education structures more than anything else.  Any mother–working a paying job or not–wants institutions in place that support her children.  The real anti-family agenda is from people who do not support the basic structures of civilization.   Folks that can’t write checks for tutors, nannies, preventative health care measures, prenatal services, childhood illness treatment, extra curricular activities and fancy schools and colleges rely on society recognizing the benefits of good health and education for its members.  A decent society provides decent public goods. We pool our funds to benefit the economic security and health of our country. Our recent spending priorities have been wars, weapons, and subsidies to businesses that pollute, gamble, and abuse our resources. None of this is healthy for the future of our children.

These interests have now set up a cat fight between women to take our minds off the real problems.   Feast your eyes on the Ryan Budget and you will see–as Paul Krugman puts it–who is cannibalizing our future and our families.

One general rule of modern politics is that the people who talk most about future generations — who go around solemnly declaring that we’re burdening our children with debt — are, in practice, the people most eager to sacrifice our future for short-term political gain. You can see that principle at work in the House Republican budget, which starts with dire warnings about the evils of deficits, then calls for tax cuts that would make the deficit even bigger, offset only by the claim to have a secret plan to make up for the revenue losses somehow or other.

And you can see it in the actions of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who talks loudly about acting responsibly but may actually be the least responsible governor the state has ever had.

Mr. Christie’s big move — the one that will define his record — was his unilateral decision back in 2010 to cancel work that was already under way on a new rail tunnel linking New Jersey with New York. At the time, Mr. Christie claimed that he was just being fiscally responsible, while critics said that he had canceled the project just so he could raid it for funds.

Now the independent Government Accountability Office has weighed in with a report on the controversy, and it confirms everything the critics were saying.

Chris Christie lied on a project that would shorten commutes, provide jobs, and basically create a better situation for families in the northeast corridor.  I have only to ask why?  Well, if you take a look at the Ryan Budget and the Norquist mentality, the deal is that most of these folks don’t want the community and its families to succeed, they want their cronies to be able to make a buck off of everything.  They want all the power and all the money within their plutocracy. I’m not talking about government ownership of airlines, telecommunications, or any other move that one could logically equate with socialism.  I talking funding and providing infrastructure improvements and the taxes that would enable them for the benefit of all.  These kinds of public projects  are ones that only a government can do successfully because of the scale and related economies.  Jonathan Alter demonstrates that today’s republicans don’t recognize that the benefits from legitimate public projects bring benefits that far outweigh the costs for every one.

Grover Norquist, the tax-cutting champion, famously said he wanted to shrink the federal government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub.”

With gargantuan deficits, that seems like a pipe dream, but it may be time to start running the water.

The new plan offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved recently by Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans puts the Republicans on record supporting a federal government that within a decade will consist of little more than national defense, entitlements and interest on the national debt.

Those are largely transfer payments to defense contractors, seniors and bankers. The rest of what the government actually does would be eviscerated, from building roads to environmental protection to medical research.

Ryan has abandoned the Republican fantasy on display during the primaries that cutting liberal spending programs will be enough to restore fiscal sanity. He’d go where the big money is — entitlement reform — and also eliminate a series of tax deductions used by the affluent, though in an April 10 editorial board session with Bloomberg View he was still mum on which ones.

Ryan does not represent the historical positions of any Republican administration.  The first Republican Project that required some taxes was the civil war. The used taxes on the rich–among other things–to fund that, reconstruction, and expansion into the westward part of the country.

To fund the war, the federal government taxed as it had never taxed before. The tariff, long the main source of government revenue, was raised sharply. So were excise taxes on commodities such as liquor. The government also instituted the country’s first income tax, which imposed a 3 percent levy on incomes above $800. It was soon raised to 3 percent on earnings of more than $600 and 5 percent on those that exceeded $10,000.

In the mid-19th century, anyone would have considered a person with a $10,000 annual income “rich.”

With the war’s end, government outlays declined sharply. In 1865, they had been almost $1.3 billion, the first time any government anywhere had spent more than $1 billion in a year. By 1870, they had declined to $309 million.

The income tax was allowed to lapse in 1873, and excise taxes were lowered as well. What remained very high was the tariff. But the purpose of a high tariff wasn’t solely to fund federal operations; it was so high that the government ran budget surpluses for 28 straight years, from 1866 to 1893.

Rather, the tariff was kept high to protect the booming industrialization of the American economy in the postwar years. That was very popular in the Northeast and Midwest, where the industry was concentrated, but deeply unpopular in the South and West.

The Republicans also wanted a transcontinental railroad. Look back to the article for the kinds of things built by Republican Presidents–still useful today–that wouldn’t pass muster with today’s Republican Party.  This again comes from the Alter article cited above.  All of these things improved commerce, provided jobs, and made the country much better off.  Each generation of Americans–up until now–were always better off than our predecessors because they invested in a future for us.

The 1856 Republican platform demanded that “the Federal Government render immediate and efficient aid in [the] construction” of a transcontinental railroad. Money was also pledged for “the improvement of rivers and harbors.”

Soon thereafter, Abraham Lincoln signed laws creating hundreds of new colleges (the Morrill Land Grant Act), helping Americans buy property (the Homestead Act), establishing a new Cabinet department (Agriculture) and protecting public land from development (Yosemite).

Today’s Republican Party is on the other side of each of those Lincoln-era achievements, voting to slash money for education (Pell grants, which are discretionary, would be eviscerated in the Ryan budget), withdraw federal loans to buy property (closing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), shut Cabinet departments (Romney has said he’d shutter a few, though not which ones) and open up more coastlines for drilling.

The idea of using government money to invest in the future hardly died with Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal; Dwight Eisenhower constructed the interstate highway system; and Republicans have voted for smaller such investments repeatedly over the years.

You get the idea.  We shouldn’t even have to introduce the other items coming from Democratic Presidents like FDR that did projects like the Hoover Dam, rural electrification, and the blue star highways that were predecessors to Eisenhower’s interstate system.  If you look at countries that have made priorities of internet systems and/or solar energy projects rather than let a few for-profit businesses piece together networks around urban areas, you’ll see the benefits of federal projects that we’re losing right now.  We may not only see rural Americans loose the benefit of these things but also of something as basic as the constitutionally mandated postal service.  If some one can’t make extraordinary profit from it, today’s Republicans don’t want it.

I”ll let Paul Krugman have the last word.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

But think beyond that, public education, the national park system, great science projects like the moon shots or huge telescopes would not be done by private industry without huge amounts of federal largess or protection.  Then there’s medical research like Nuclear medicine, genetics, and prevention of diseases by vaccinations.  All of these started out as government funded projects before they were profitable enough to be transferred to the private sector. Why do today’s republicans think small for the country and big only for the 1%?  Why are they creating a cat fight to take us off the real problems that challenge our children’s future?