How many people take the time to wonder what kind of country we would be living in if the 2000 election had not been stolen from Al Gore? Perhaps Ralph Nader and his supporters can “congratulate” themselves for making a “difference,” but the rest of us cannot be so sanguine about the truth. Who can doubt that the country’s fiscal situation would be far more manageable? No tax cuts for the rich, which would not have been used to spur job growth, but to find ways to create a larger cash stash or gamble it away in financial casinos. Businesses might actually have been “forced” to make more money by "alternative" means, like investing in expansion and jobs as they did during the Clinton administration. A Democratic administration would have lessened unregulated opportunities to engage in predatory lending (and its offshoot—derivative “insurance”) by continuing to support and fund affordable housing subsidies. Recessions are inevitable, but financial institutions would not have been in near the state they found themselves in, and the national and budget deficits would have been at acceptable levels rather than “crisis” levels. Revenue would have remained stable, keeping federal deficits and the national debt within reasonable limits. With stable job growth, revenue and federal assistance, state governments would have been sufficiently within their means to prevent widespread public sector layoffs and education and health care cuts, which only promise long-term disastrous consequences of the nation. The question the media and responsible commentators are not asking us is if the Bush tax cuts and their accompanying public sector cuts were worth it. Sure, the right would continue to whine about taxes and “big” government, but a majority of people would recognize that the right’s vision was—and is—much more damaging to the nation’s health in the long run. And who must pay the price for the negligence and arrogance of the right? Anyone who isn't independently wealthy.
Tax cuts for the rich not only did not spur the economy and create jobs (a net of 2 million compared to 22 million in the Clinton administration), but along with Bush’s wars insured that when the time came, the government would be hogtied to do something meaningful about it, because of the massive deficits incurred under Bush and a Republican Congress—a congress that helped him “hide” the true costs of their military adventures, and inevitably the true state of the country. If 9-11 occurred in an alternate administrative universe—and it might very well not have, given the outgoing administration’s and subsequent FBI warnings to Bush that Al-Qaeda was plotting such an attack, which the Bush and his aiders and abettors apparently chose not to take seriously—Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan would have remained the principle target for military suppression, and would have been quickly isolated and marginalized. As for Saddam Hussein, he would have continued to be isolated by the international community, and in hindsight we can say that Iraq would have certainly been affected by the “Arab Spring,” and Hussein could have been forced from power in the same manner as Qaddafi, without incurring the trillion dollars in costs and thousands of American deaths.
Thus the right’s attacks on Barack Obama seem not only hypocritical, but a lie to mask their own abject failure to govern. Instead, the right tries to drown-out reason by shouting over it, apparently in the belief that the louder they shout, people will be so flustered that they won’t know what to believe; being paranoid and fearful, a majority seems willing to be gulled by mindless rhetoric that deliberately obfuscates reality. The 2012 election will tell us just to what extent this is true; the 2010 election at least warned us of the danger.
No comments:
Post a Comment