Best of 2011: The Budget Talks: Atlas Would Have Shrugged

I'm going on vacation, so I wanted to put out Sunday's editorial early. Plus, I feel like I've got to get this off of my chest. This week's budget talks were a reminder of everything I hate about Washington – too many egos, an unparalleled level of self-absorption and a complete, utter lack of political courage. This is not about spending. This is not about the deficit. This isn't about the economy. This isn't even about ambition as much as it's about fear. These are career politicians leveraged by the financiers of their trade to move on some long-sought ideological positions, while the time is ripe. The bag men really have become bigger than the bureaucracy, and they've now proven that they are capable of removing even the most entrenched politicians – and with that comes real power – power they are wielding to our collective demise.

You see, the juice men can ”primary“ them now. They used to own the politicians, now they don't need to. They own their seats outright and any meat puppet will do. They own the banks and they own the corporations. They own the media channels. And now, ironically, they've used the very pawns they play to create a judicial branch so ideologically corrupted that they have not only endorsed the system of big money politics, they have shrouded it with constitutional legitimacy and protection. This is the moment American citizens. It is no longer your country. Your government is incapable of changing a light bulb and not because government is inherently inept, but because it has become deliberately corrupt, incessantly incompetent and downright cowardly.

Look at the career politicians calculating every possible outcome and trying to position themselves to have the most amount of sway when the one in front of them falls. Look at the so-called men, cloaked in titles like speaker of this and leader of that – refusing to to stand up to the self-serving ideologues and say ”enough“ – thunderously say that it's over. There's a common sense solution here and I don't care who tries to tar and feather me afterward. We need to increase revenues and cut spending. We'll be done by lunch.

Do the math ladies and gentlemen. In 2001, revenues were at 19.5 percent of GDP, spending was at 18.6. That was our surplus. Today, revenues are at 14.9 percent of GDP, spending at 23.9. That’s our deficit. Is everyone still with me? I had my 7 year old work the numbers today. Revenues are down and spending is up – even he said so. The only way someone can think that you can balance that equation by cutting spending without raising revenues is by utterly refusing to pay attention to that which they learned by 5th grade at the latest.

Stop listening to this nonsense that if you don't give subsidies to corporations who are seeing record profits they'll just raise prices and we can't afford that. Oh, but we can afford to bring down the whole house of cards if someone doesn't get 100 percent of their way? Is it a free market, or isn't it? If they could charge more now, they would! What's stopping them – their good will?

 
We line their pockets and before we make one more American child living below the poverty line in the richest nation on planet Earth lose a drop-in-the-bucket social program that puts food in their wretched, distended, starving belly, we must STOP. Or else don't tell me one more time that we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian ideals, that any of these people embody family values or that anything as comparably trivial as who gets to get married is based on something  sacred. If how we treat the least amongst us no longer has sanctity, then there is no more sacred and God doesn't live here anymore. End the self-serving hypocrisy of it all and just say we're out to get ours and your brother no longer has a keeper because we can't afford one. I can live with that, but not the hypocritical, blasphemous double talk that pretends to be one thing when it's another and uses that joke to look down its nose at everything and everyone else. 

Furthermore, why does it seem that no one remembers that the Bush Tax cuts of 2001 WERE TEMPORARY BY DESIGN! Because they're all afraid of guys like Grover Norquist and his Koch funded attack groups, who've pulled the strings since H.W. uttered his famous final words. So the GOP bullied their way to an extension in 2010, saying that the economy couldn't withstand their expiration and the President caved. Now they're saying that it can't withstand the debt. It used to be that a trillion dollar debt meant the sky was falling and the system was going to collapse, or so the Chicken Littles told us.

But strangely, it was only when we had a President of the opposite party that debt ever mattered to the other. The Democrats are saddled with all of their sound bites about evil debt from '04 to '08. The Republicans are saddled with not giving a damn about it when Reagan exploded the national debt, Bush I followed suit and Bush II carried the water all the way down the road (though to his credit, Reagan raised taxes seven times when he recognized the need for revenues). Today, none of them have credibility complaining about debt, because they were all complicit at some point.

Furthermore, they make it painfully clear that the whole lot of them, for all of their Ivy League diplomas and supposed business experience do not understand a leveraged economy, eflux and reflux of capital, inflation and the money supply, basic tenets of international trade and finance, monetary science or any other aspect of economics that would allow them to grasp the actual problems and solutions were they at all inclined to do so – which it again appears painfully clear that they are not.

Republicans were offered $3 trillion in cuts for closing $1 trillion in loopholes and subsidies that go to profits during a time of RECORD PROFITS – when else can you afford to close those irresponsible, revenue-draining, socialist handouts if not during a time of record profit? Let them make their ”profits“ in the "free market" that they always promote. Still not good enough? Then it is clear that there is no solution to be had, that this is merely fear of being eaten by their own; that it's ideological politics and positioning for the 2012 presidential election – at the expense of the health of our economy as a whole and working class Americans everywhere. Shame on all of them. Where is political courage when we need it most?

This reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, the great bible of objectivism that so many of these same people like to quote. The part where all of the mooching freeloaders are grabbing for pieces as the whole thing falls down in front of them, fighting each other to be kings of a great, big pile of useless dirt that used to be the greatest nation on earth. The funny part is that so many people today point to that book in defense of their looting (Ayn Rand's word). You see, she wrote it as a condemnation of the early Russian socialism she escaped and the fear of New Deal-style social welfare that her own experience impressed upon her.

Some people draw a line from those policies to today's deficit, because it conveniently fits their narrative. They willfully ignore Ike's fear of a military industrial complex – the one that dominates government spending today – the one we can't touch because there are too many well-placed looters who rely on it for handouts. They willfully ignore the no-bid contracts and the way corporations like Haliburton and G.E. eerily resemble Rand's Associated Steel; the way the great industrialists of today have grown fat and addicted to the same rigged system of subsidized and engineered profit as Rand's cartoonish neo-liberal caricatures.

They fancy themselves Hank Reardens, Francisco d'Anconias and even John Galts, when they're really just a bunch of Wesley Mooches, Jim Taggarts and at best, Cuffy Meigs – the outright gangster who at least wore his stripes on his sleeve. They have simply draped their looting in new words and theories, found new evangelists to preach their religion, bought new colleges to stamp it with their academic badges. They've built a fantasy world that allows them to pretend outwardly that they are the exact opposite of that which they know themselves to be. This is the same old song and dance America. It's just a new band playing the tune at what's starting to look more and more like the end of the show. We'd better wake up before the final bow. This is one curtain call I don't want to see...

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist and editor for The Bradenton Times. An archive of his columns is available here. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com.