On the Contrary

On Meet the Press on Sunday, conservative Joe Scarborough was in a discussion about if the Republican Party is fracturing and he made this comment:  “ …when I, when I ran in 1994, the Republican Party on the state, national and local level tried to run against me a moderate Republican. And I’m not talking, I’m not talking abortion or gay marriage, I’m talking taxes and spending, small government.  That’s great to reinvigorate the base.”

So other than the wingnuts who see black helicopters and socialism everywhere, the conservative revival according to Joe and many Republicans, will be based on tax reduction, minimal federal government spending, and small government, which is code for few regulations.  What I can’t figure out is why doesn’t anyone challenges this ideas as exactly how we got into the mess we are in today.   The Bush administration passed a tax break that emptied the treasury and set up our wild out of control deficits.  Oh by the way, this same administration and the Republican Congress went wild on spending including the Iraq war with absolutely no control.  Finally they couldn’t reduce the size of government so what they did was emasculate its ability to regulate and manage its affairs.  The outcome was disastrous from Katrina to the financial meltdown.  We have had no energy plan, no infrastructure investment, no climate control policy, minimal spending in R&D, assuming that somehow the market would solve all these problems.

Now one can surmise that all these tenets of the conservative mantra are based on faith in the market system and capitalism so lets examine this system and the conservative beliefs in it.  This can be summed up as let the market place, through capitalism, operate with a minimum of restraints and our economy will be humming.  But anybody who really reads Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations understands that there is no such thing as perfect competition.  Regulations didn’t come first.  They came after gross abuses mandated them because of the public outcry.  Labor laws, safety regulations, environmental laws, truth in lending laws, monopoly laws, banking laws, handicap access, minimum wage, all come to mind.  Companies that worship capitalism are always maneuvering to stifle competition so that they will have an eternal competitive advantage.  Government’s role is to level this playing field and to curb the worst abuses.  Conservatives totally miss this.

So the bottom line is that regulations are necessary to level the playing field, keep honest competition a reality, and prevent unrestrained capitalism from abuses to the environment, labor, safety, you name it.  Now I will be the first to admit that there are many regulations that are counterproductive but at this juncture in our mess, it is clear that regulations and an effective government to carry them out are a given.  Then we can perform a careful assessment of what works and what doesn’t, and refine those regulations.  But a philosophy carried out in reality that hates government and all regulations will just return us to the Bush mess of 2007.

So much for the small government and few regulations.  What is required is effective government, but that is not what conservatives believe in.  Quite the opposite, they see government as “the problem”.  A philosophy that ignores reality is bound to fail when put into practice.  Does anybody remember the lessons learned from George Bush?  Oh, I know, most conservatives avoid confronting these realities by saying George wasn’t a real conservative.  It is denial at a humongous level.  It is humongous because I hear every day people say they don’t want government to run something.  They fail to understand that almost everything they have today from clean and adequate water supply, a reliable transportation system, to their education and medical insurance in old age is a direct result of government action.  They only remember the failures or hindrances they perceive, not the overall impact.

Now on the tax and spend mantra, what is meant is low taxes and little spending.  But as I have pointed out in other blogs (See Republicans Aren’t Evil are They?), investment is the lifeblood of businesses, so why wouldn’t it be the lifeblood of a country.  Low taxes in themselves are not an elixir.  Many studies have shown that lowering taxes too much has a detrimental effect on the long-term health of an economy just as raising them too high.  The other side of this coin is deficits.  The deficit is large and further growth of it scares everyone.  But we got that debt as noted earlier, not by investing in our future, but in tax cuts for the wealthy and failing to pay for proper investments in this country.  The conservatives would dry up any investment in our future and in fact mortgage our future on the present.  It’s called selfishness.  As noted in a News and World report, the USA has fallen from fourth to ninth this year as a rating of the richest countries in the world.  This has been a direct result of conservative economic policies we have followed for the last eight years.  The article notes that this is not because of the recession as other countries are quickly recovering and we are not.

Some of these measures that were evaluated to determine our status were jobs, poverty, education, economic growth, competitiveness, prosperity, health, and happiness.  Now we are falling in all these measures after eight wonderful years of conservative economic policy.  The deficit is scary, but we are going to need to make investments in the short term to create cash flow in the economy.   Unemployment will increase, along with foreclosures.  States see shrinking revenues for the foreseeable future, which means more cuts.  The fact that companies are showing more profitability will not solve these problems.  They aren’t selling more; they have reduced staff and work longer hours.  The stock market reflects the faux profitability of these companies and economists use these numbers to say we are in a recovery.  But if demand continues to shrink, no one is going to hire.  The real recovery will be when people have jobs and their purchasing power grows.  Right now it is continuing to shrink.  Simply reigning in government spending is going to worsen this cyclic problem.  That spending needs to be directed where it will be most effective and that is not in tax cuts.

So if you like where we have been, and you will if you are in the top 1% of income earners, then continue the conservative economic approach.  If you want to see us get out of this mess, then we need to think about new ways of doing business.  This is going to take smart investment by our government, and reasonable tax policies to implement this policy.  Instead we have conservatives promising us a return to wonderland if we will just re-embrace conservative hate-government, cut taxes, and spend little. I am not gullible enough to tell you that the Democrats have the answer, but we have tried the conservative approach and it has failed miserably   If you are that stupid to try it again, you deserve your fate.