There seem to be two concepts that drive the Republican agenda, balanced budget and smaller government. A first glance neither seems particularly outrageous but upon further inspection, as applied by the far right and driven by the Teabaggers, both lose a great deal of their appeal and all of their rationality.
We all want a balanced budget, it makes sense, it appeals to our need for stability in an often chaotic world, but reason tells us that what we want and what we need are not always the same or achievable. Even a seven year old has come to realize that he or she will not always get what he or she wants. The Teabaggers have not quite grasped this reality. That is not to say that a balanced budget is impossible. There was a time, in the distant past when a president named Bill Clinton had set the nation on a path to a balanced budget. If his successors had continued his plan we might at this moment have one.
Unfortunately his successors weren’t as smart as Mr. Clinton. They thought they were, but that was because they were dealing with serious hubris problems brought on by even more serious mental malfunction. Bush/Cheney, the Republican team that replaced Mr. Clinton decided that they didn’t have to consider the ramifications of their actions, they only had to consider whether or not they wanted to act and being men’s men, John Wayne style Texicans. They did just that. They started one war with a country that still doesn’t realize it’s a country, simply because a small group of tribesmen, had, as a matter of hospitality and tribal tradition, sheltered some terrorists and another with a country that did know it was a country but had no idea why it was being attacked. Oh yeah, it had oil… they thought. Then instead of increasing taxes to pay for these wars they cut them for their rich friends. No wonder the Teabaggers hate government. Oh, wait a minute they don’t hate that government. See they’re confused too. That’s probably because all the guys who backed Bush/Cheney in their destruction of the road to a balanced budget are now the ones whining that they want one.
Where were Boehner, Kly, Sessions, McCollough, Gingrich, Pence, Ryan and Bachmann when Bush/Cheney were destroying our economy and creating a trillion dollar deficit? Oh yeah, they were helping. And now, when what we need most are jobs and when balancing the budget, though still important, must come in second place, they just don’t get it.
“The Budget Must Be Balanced Now,” they cry, and like most ignorant people they accept and beatify the first idea that thuds into their addled brains, “cut spending.” Not a terrible idea, just one that needs help. In order to balance our, out of whack budget on cuts alone we will have to destroy all the things that make our country worth living in. We will have to change our country from a bombastic, innovating land where we treat all our citizens with care and consideration to a third world country where the rich and strong use, abuse and kill the poor and weak. If that’s what you want you don’t have to screw up this perfectly good country, all you have to do is move to Nigeria, or Somalia or any one of a dozen countries that would love to be like us but are now being run by the type of people Jon Kyl and Mike Pence would like to be.
Civilized nations take care of their people. That’s not socialism, that civilization, and it’s the difference between us, and the people who want to be us. Yes, we should balance the budget but we should do it in a sensible way that combines certain cuts that will not hurt our economic recovery or our more needy citizens, along with certain revenue additions that should include the end of the Bush tax cuts plus changes to the IRS code that will eliminate things like tax breaks for already profitable oil companies.
But balancing the budget isn’t all the Republicans want. They also, especially the Teabaggers, want smaller government. The first question that comes to mind about that, is smaller than what? The Republicans aren’t exactly clear about that. They just want it small. The Teabaggers are very specific. They want it so small that it can’t function at all and then we’d have anarchy and the gun nuts could take over. But let’s deal with the serious people. You want to make government smaller, the first thing you do is make it more efficient. The only outfit less efficient than the bureaucracy of our government is our defense department but we’ll get to that in another blog.
If our intergovernmental inefficiency rate is smaller than 35% I would be shocked. So right there you have a savings of one third of our government costs but wait a minute. To save that 35% you have to lose that amount of your workers. How does that sit with our already astronomic unemployment rate? The answer is that it doesn’t. So what do we do? We expand, but along with that we shave off all the little inefficiencies that are costing us money and giving us no result. The workers whose jobs are saved by installing efficient practices, rather than being laid off, get new things to do, things that will help the country, like working on the infrastructure projects that will help keep us from falling back into the nineteenth century.
I absolutely understand the fury that runs through the Tea Party membership when they consider the monumental size and miniscule output of the government bureaucracy but they must in turn realize that electing dummies and clowns just because they are fresh faces is not the road to efficiency. Of the entire Tea Party contingent in the House not more than a handful have any understanding of the concept of governance or how to go about it. Jumping up and down and screaming SHUT EM DOWN is not the answer – unless, of course, you’re the brain dead Mike Pence.
So what’s the answer? Efficiency is the answer. Obama has proved that he can’t fight the big battles. His need to compromise puts him at an insurmountable disadvantage when he gets in the ring with anyone who is at all motivated, so what he has to do is prove his points by making the system work. Right now it doesn’t, but if he can somehow make the bureaucracy work, or at least get better, he will have some small platform on which to base the need for spending money on infrastructure. If he can’t save money by eliminating inefficiency then the Right will have proved its point, that the only way to cut the deficit is to cut programs, programs that are desperately needed, and the country will never get a shot at the spending it needs to get out of the unemployment hole.