Fifty Little Hoovers and One Big Lie
this is going to be awesome for America.
Republicans who have taken over state capitols across the country are promising to respond to crippling budget deficits with an array of cuts, among them proposals to reduce public workers’ benefits in Wisconsin, scale back social services in Maine and sell off state liquor stores in Pennsylvania, endangering the jobs of thousands of state workers.
States face huge deficits, even after several grueling years of them, and just as billions of dollars in stimulus money from Washington is drying up.
With some of these new Republican state leaders having taken the possibility of tax increases off the table in their campaigns, deep cuts in state spending will be needed. These leaders, committed to smaller government, say that is the idea.
“We’re going to do what families and businesses all over this country have already had to do, and that is live within their means,” said Brian Bosma, a Republican who will soon become the speaker of the Indiana House, alongside a Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, and a supermajority of Republicans in the State Senate.
That’s quite a lot of little Hoovers running around, ready to throw their constituents into joblessness and their states into depression. Ohio’s just lost a ton of jobs thanks to John Kasich’s hostility to railroads and his hatred of the employed. Same with New Jersey, where Chris Christie (sock puppet for 101.5 WNJN) has decided to hamstring the state’s economic development for the next 20 years by canceling a massive transit project, and coming soon to Pennsylvania where governor-elect Corbett has stated that Chris Christie’s style gives him a rock-hard conservative boner. Good times all around. 2011 is going to be a great year if you’re wealthy, and a horrible year for everyone else. 2012 is going to be awful. We’re led by charlatans and liars.
Let’s focus, for a moment, on one of the biggest lies that conservatives and Republicans like to spread:
“We’re going to do what families and businesses all over this country have already had to do, and that is live within their means.”
That’s such a big fucking lie, i don’t even know where to begin. Americans have been unable to live within their means for decades, going back at least to Clinton and probably to Bush Senior. I’m speaking, in this case, of wage stagnation experienced by the majority of Americans in the aftermath of NAFTA and “free trade”. In those years, as wages stayed flat while the price of everything went up, more and more Americans came to rely on their credit cards to fill the gap, from buying groceries to filling the car with gasoline. Over-reliance on credit cards is one reasons we’re in so much trouble now, especially after 2005 when the Republicans and Democrats came together to pass the Orwellian-named Bankruptcy Reform and Consumr Protection Act, allowing credit cards to charge whatever rates and fees they like, to a captive consumer.
In fact, every day Americans do exactly the same as the government, deficit spending, when they need to complete important projects that they can’t afford out of pocket. I’m going to do it this weekend: I am going to apply for a loan to fix my porch roof. It’s a project that, like a railroad tunnel to New York, i can’t afford out of pocket, but like that same tunnel, one that will significantly improve the value of my property. So like the government does when it’s run by sensible people, I’m going to borrow against the future, I’m going to dip into funds I don’t have, I’m going to deficit spend, and then I will pay the money back over time with interest.
THAT is what “families and businesses all over this country have already had to do”, despite Republican fantasies to the contrary. The only people who can afford to take on big projects paid in full up-front are the extremely wealthy…which just happens to be the only class the Republicans feel they represent.
