Draconian: A Second Look At the GOP's Cuts

Okay, perhaps I wasn't being fair yesterday when I slammed the Tea Party's proposed budget plan for the rest of the federal fiscal year (which runs until September 30). Maybe I was just being a sorry liberal, not caring about my children and grandchildren and the oppressive debt they are going to have to pay off. Maybe I just didn't care about the job-crushing,innovation-stifling, anti-American, Neo-Marxist-Muslim Caliphate that Barack Hussein Osama Obama is trying to foist on an unsuspecting nation. Maybe I'm just a tool of the enemy.  

So I decided to look even closer at the House Appropriations Committee Tea Party-inspired plan. Here's what I found:

Terminated programs:

• AmeriCorps
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Project RIO (Reintegration of Ex-Offenders)
• YouthBuild (a jobs training program for youth in the juvenile justice system) 
• Green Jobs Innovation Fund
• Career Pathways Innovation Fund
• National Health Service Corps Scholarship Fund
• Family Planning (Title X)
• Teen Pregnancy Prevention Discretionary Grants
• Mentoring Children of Prisoners Grants
• Even Start Family Literacy Program
• Striving Readers Grants for Middle and High Schools
• High School Graduation Initiative (School Dropout Prevention Initiative)
• Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (higher ed financial assistance for very low income students)
• LEAP (work-study program for low-income college students)

 

Even the Tea Partiers can't completely gut every domestic social program (yet), but they are proposing deep reductions in the following:

• Community Health Centers which serve the uninsured (46 percent of regular appropriation)
• Substance abuse treatment (more than $200 million cut)
• Community Services Block Grant (44 percent cut)
• Low Income Home Energy Assistance contingency fund (66 percent cut)
• FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program (50 percent cut)
• Title I (K-12 education for low-income students) ($693.5 million)
• IDEA (special education) grants to states:  (nearly $560 million) 
• Commodity Supplemental Food Program (11.4 percent cut)
• Community Development Fund ($2.95 billion, or 66.3 percent cut)
• Project-based rental assistance ($715.5 million, or 8.4 percent cut)
• Public Housing Capital Fund ($1.07 billion, or 42 percent cut)
• Housing for the Elderly ($551 million, or 67 percent cut)
• Housing for Persons with Disabilities ($210 million, or 70 percent cut)
• Head Start ($1billion, or 15 percent cut) Yes, I misreported this yesterday as one of the terminated programs. More Marxist disinformation. Sorry.

Back in 7th century BCE Athens, a lawyer proposed a new set of laws, to replace the oral traditions and to be administered through a new court system. Draco's solution to the arbitrary and unfair traditions was to impose extremely harsh sanctions. Debtors were forced into slavery. The death penalty was ordered for even minor infractions of the penal code. "Draconian" became the term for any legal solution utterly lacking in moral sense. 

So, on reflection, I wasn't being fair yesterday. If the GOP succeeds with this madness, (an all too real possibility), the deficit will continue unabated and the real structural problems with Medicare and Social Security will remain. But America will be poorer, less educated, less healthy and less competitive than we already are. 

Here's fair: restore taxes to their pre-2003 levels for people like me, fix the gaping holes in the Medicare and Social Security systems and save the country. That's fair. 

But this--this is just Draconian. 

The Tea Party's Foolish Budget Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. --Ralph W. Emerson


On Wednesday, after Hal Rogers said he would cut $36 billion from current-year federal expenditures, the Kentucky Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee was dragged into a dark corner of the Congressional playground and threatened by Tea Party bullies, the feathers of their Indian headdresses waving in the revolutionary breeze. "Cut more!" they cried. "Cut $100 billion! Or else!" 

So he did. His proposal on Friday to completely eliminate or severely reduce the size of hundreds of federal programs beginning on March 5 reads like the midnight fantasy of a Heritage Foundation intern: cut spending on HIV/AIDS, overseas food grants, juvenile justice,  neighborhood policing, space exploration, weather services, food and shelter programs for the poor, community-based health care clinics, the Internal Revenue Service. Completely eliminate the perennial conservative bugaboos of Head Start, NPR and AmeriCorps.


You have to give the Tea Party credit: they yearn for consistency. They promised that they would cut spending and this is their first attempt. They are going after programs that make their cultists writhe in glorious hatred. But they are incredibly foolish in their consistency. 


In the scope of a $1.5 trillion deficit, they have left untouched the real causes of the deficit: reckless tax cuts, over-reaching military adventures, Medicare and Social Security. Average monthly federal spending in FY 2010 in Iraq is $5.4 billion and in Afghanistan is $5.7 billion. That's more than $125 billion a year ignored by Tea Party and its statesmen, philosophers and divines. 


But the foolish consistency of the Tea Party demands elimination of AmeriCorps, where AmeriCorps members spend at least a year serving their country, working in programs at nonprofits and schools. That's going to save $1 billion as it puts thousands of nonprofits out of business. Not to mention the 100,000 people who will be unemployed on March 5 when the program ends. Of course, the Tea Party's budget doesn't have any extra money in it for unemployment insurance claims from out of work nonprofit staff and AmeriCorps members. For that would be inconsistent. 


And the Tea Party is not inconsistent. Foolish, yes. Inconsistent, no.

The NAACP: The Power Of A Relic

A finger bone. A bit of body ash. A piece of the True Cross. A single beard hair. Virtually every religious movement has its relics. The ancient Jews had the bones of Joseph, and later, a sample of manna, that mysterious substance that fed them through their forty year trek in the Canaanite desert. The ancient Athenians had the bodies of Oedipus and Theseus. Buddhists had all manner of pieces of the Buddha, despite his distaste for any sort of religious veneration. Even the iconoclastic Muslims have relics of the Prophet, including his cloak, sword and a hair from his beard. Christianity produced a veritable industry of relics, especially in its Roman and Orthodox branches. Political movements produce their relics too: Stalin, entombed in glass and South Carolina's Confederate Relic Room come to mind. (I'm not comparing the Daughters of the Confederacy to Stalinists. Or maybe I am.) Relics serve, for believers, as a way of remembering those who have gone before, offering homage for their faithfulness and the truths their lives revealed.

The American Civil Rights Movement, that long struggle against the legacy of slavery and racism produced its share of relics, too. The civil rights movement was, at its best, a religious movement, calling Americans to repentance for the creation of a society both separate and unequal, which eventually tore down the barriers blocking the way for people who are not of European descent. Its triumph is most notable in the ascension of an African American to the Presidency. It has its relics as well, one of them being the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Calling the NAACP a "relic" has become quite fashionable on the hysterical right. They mean that there is no longer any need for such a thing as an organization that advances "colored people." But I use the term in its religious sense: the NAACP, reminds us that there was a time, not so very long ago, when black Americans were second-class citizens, when there was a need for an organization to actively call for their advancement. We gaze upon their story, and we remember.

And here's the strange thing about relics: they have no power in themselves. They are just memory devices, mnemonic tricks, to keep us from forgetting the story of the relic. That's why the NAACP still has power in a time when a black man is President, when young black or Hispanic or Asian Americans can truly become anything they choose to be. It's why, when the NAACP passed a resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party movement, it set the punditsphere all a-Twitter. Everyone clearly remembered the time of legal racism in America, and whether one agreed with the Tea Party or the NAACP, no one wanted to go back there.

It's why the Tea Party Federation yesterday excommunicated Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams after the overtly racist "Letter to Abraham Lincoln" post appeared on his blog. No political movement which expects to be taken seriously in America can allow itself to be racist, whether in appearance or intent. The majority of Americans are not racists, nor will they support political movements which are, no matter whether they are "right" or "left." This is a good thing, and the Tea Party Federation should be commended for it. Whatever racist elements have glommed onto a movement which is ostensibly about the size and role of government need to be expunged, decisively and quickly. Because America has changed.

One need not be a supporter of South Carolina's Nikki Haley to rejoice that a woman of Indian descent has a pretty good chance to inherit the Governorship of our state. One need not be a small government libertarian to be glad that Tim Scott, a black man, trounced Paul Thurmond, scion of South Carolina's one-time Dixiecrat Governor, in the GOP primary for the 1st Congressional District. Both Haley and Scott have a lot of convincing to do before liberals will come over to their side. But liberals should be delighted that they are there. For their racial background will eat away at what remains of the poisonous Dixiecrat legacy. The backwoods bigots, who don't want a "raghead" or a "n-----" in the Governor's Mansion or in Congress, now find themselves further marginalized. The Democrats long ago abandoned them, and now, the GOP will have to as well.

Relics, to an unbeliever, may seem like silly superstition. But listen carefully, and their story can still work miracles.

The Delusion of Libertarianism

Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.--Robert Locke--The American Conservative


The Tea Party, that amorphous movement created by the news media, fancies itself Libertarian. In fact, the Libertarian Party, "America's Third Largest Political Party," claimed in April 2009, that it was the progenitor of the Tea Parties. Libertarianism enshrines individual liberty and property ownership as the highest ideals of a free society. If only government could be restrained, goes the Libertarian creed, true freedom and equality would emerge. The absence of laws and regulations would create peace and prosperity for all, without annoyances like taxes, public schools and social welfare programs. Everyone would be rich, because everyone would be able to work, invest his or her earnings, and live in big houses on Lake Murray. Government programs, like "Obama-care," are unconstitutional abridgements of the inalienable rights of man. Utopia is only out reach because Big Government wants it so.

Libertarians insist, with the certainty of religious conviction, that they are the true inheritors of the mantle of liberty, the living descendants of the Enlightenment, the Magesterium entrusted with interpreting the divinely inspired words of the Constitution. That's why Libertarian and nominally-GOP Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul expressed his opinion that the Civil Rights Act was wrong when it prohibited businesses from discrimination. "[T]his," Paul said, "is the hard part about believing in freedom." The public outcry caused Paul to back-pedal, but he was not, in fact, expressing anything except what Libertarians believe: government should not tell corporations what to do, it should get out of their way and let them make money.

But the Rand Tempest in-a-Tea-Pot revealed Libertarianism's true philosophy: government exists (when it exists at all) to protect the unrestricted movement of markets and individual freedom. If  a corporation (or an individual business owner) is infringing on your rights, then you sue. That's why we have tort lawyers and courtrooms. It's why Rand called President Obama's scolding of British Petroleum "un-American." BP should stop the oil spill and clean it up, so that it can make money again. If it doesn't, then the people who are harmed by its actions should sue the hell out of it. Sounds fair, until you realize that's not exactly how the system works. Tort limits protect corporate liability and the ability of an individual to seek redress is limited by the ability to afford those expensive lawyers. Currently, oil companies don't have to pay more than $75 million in fines, no matter how much damage they do when their products fail.

The Tea Party's ennui is a result of a sense of dread, coupled with hysteria, layered over with a fine dusting of paranoia: America is being ruined by illegal immigrants, corrupt bankers, traitorous politicians and immoral media elites. The movement drifts towards Libertarianism, except when it doesn't. The South Carolina Tea Partier who screamed "Keep your Government hands off my Medicare!" has become an iconic reference to the self-parodying nature of the Libertarian insurgency. When Rand declared that he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, even though it was unconstitutional, it becomes clear that the Libertarianism, like every other human utopianism, is doomed to die in the womb.  Which is a good thing.

When GOP leaders, claiming Libertarian-Tea Party street cred in one breath, while demanding that the Obama administration "do something" to stop the oil spill in the next, it is all too clear how silly the movement is. We have tough problems in this country, at home and abroad. But the delusions of Libertarianism will not deliver us from the delusions which caused it.