Cuts Run Deep

While the New Right distracts, America is left with less of a meaningful government.

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | Almost everyone who is interested in certain Middle-Eastern wars, ongoing or pending, has theories on the motives of the Bush administration, from oil power politics, to Crusade-style anti-Islamic sentiment, even to eerily imperialistic notions of a New American Century. Yet few seem to have grandiose claims of Mason world domination or American foreign ambitions in regards to wholly domestic – and often equally important – matters of public administration and finance. Granted that budgets and taxation aren’t always the issues to rouse progressive leaders in an age where the latest Middle-East distraction dominates television ratings, it should not be ignored that the real issue being fought on the home front is the size of your government.

It has been generally accepted that the fiscal conservative line is tax cuts and reduced spending. The cuts rely on ideas of supply-side economics made popular in the 1980’s by Thatcherites and Reaganites on both sides of the Atlantic: tax cuts, especially for those who will spend the money they receive, are good for the economy. The reduced government spending line supposedly appeals to the sentiments of the average homeowner, who understands that spending less means less debt, the interest of which we would otherwise pay until Doomsday.

The current Bush administration seems to follow a similar logic in fiscal administration matters in the public realm – but make no mistake, this Administration has little interest in the short-term health of our nation’s economy.

Even those with minimal understanding of government affairs can understand that trillion-dollar tax cuts, coupled with drastically-increased military spending, lead to the elimination and reversal of the multi-billion dollar surplus legacy of the Clinton administration. With a federal deficit running into the hundreds of billions of dollars and a well-fuelled war-machine dominating foreign threats, the Bush administration still has the gall to cut billions in funding to social programmes, as well as impose new spending obligations on states and municipalities. The goal: fiscal pressure on all levels of government to shrink the entire system. The result: a cash-starved system that must make crucial choices between homeland defence, education, healthcare and other services. Governments are getting smaller, some services privatized, and others quashed – all realized through the malnourishment of federal, state and municipal programmes throughout the nation.

Yet all this most certainly shouldn’t surprise you. It’s been more than twenty years since the New Right agenda of government degradation has become a mainstay of fiscal conservatives of all stripes, starting most prominently with Margaret Thatcher – a name which causes some people’s blood to boil. The late 70’s and early 80’s – besides harbingering an epoch of mindless, self-serving conservative governments in the West – saw a new era of progressive conservatism eclipse the years of Nixon and Ford. It was a move beyond the traditional social conservatism towards economic ideals more reminiscent of eighteenth century firebrands and philosophes than contemporized, forward-looking and balanced approaches to government spending and management of a welfare state. The new goal was minimal government, whose only purpose, it would seem, was to keep the peace, and to create and enforce law. In essence, laissez-faire economics is a doctrine which pays no respect to economic differences among the populous, and therefore the fundamental inequities which are inevitable in a capitalist society. It is the quintessential antagonist of contemporary progressive economic thought.

In the United States, groups like the Heritage Foundation, a rightist think-tank that in 2003 celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, spurred the Reagan administration into tax- cutting mode which erased billions from federal coffers. Yet the administration’s goal was not only a recovery from the recession of the early 1980’s. Reagan’s hard-line against worldwide Communism, including the activist ‘Reagan Doctrine’ (similar in tone and effect to the so-called ‘Bush Doctrine’), meant billions in new military spending. With these pressures on domestic budgets, including a monstrous deficit and Reagan’s multi-trillion dollar debt legacy which remains today, administration finance officials snipped away at all levels of social spending. The effective size of federal government – at least the part dedicated to the betterment of the lives of the average American – was drastically reduced in the eight years of the Reagan era, in good economic times and in bad.

Funny how little things change. Here we are in 2003, with an inflated military budget to battle an omnipresent foreign evil with a philosophy diametrically opposed our American values, and with hundred-billion dollar tax cuts set to go in an effort to spur a lagging economy. A deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars has piled up, and with a costly war in and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the total can only rise. So why is liberal criticism of the Bush administration only heavily weighed against an illegal albeit successful war in Iraq?

It was in the time when our notions of the Big Bad Conservative changed from the war-mongering imperialist of the Nixon/Kissinger days to the benevolent and elegant splicer and dicer of social spending – the Thatchers, the Reagans, and the Mulroneys – that liberals lost their focus in the dazzling light of the immense lie that was Reaganomics. But let’s not falter now. We know very well that ‘laissez-faire’, ‘supply- side’ and ‘Reaganomics’ (or, in a contemporary light, ‘Dubyanomics’) are the buzz words for a meaningless ideology of government minimalism and non-intervention (of the domestic sort, anyways), born ironically in a time when inaccessible oligarchic governments led self-aggrandizing unilateral military campaigns and made the average citizen foot the bill. If we care at all about the state of the common American and the poor, an organized and intelligent Left must be absolutely committed to the fight against the ideologues of New Conservative government anorexia.

In the world’s leading economy, one cannot shirk domestic issues for foreign distractions and maintain moral integrity. The United States government is the richest and most powerful institution on the planet – and, not coincidentally, the institution with the potential to do the greatest good. Rallies, die-ins and other news-makers cannot be exclusive to anti-war and environmentalist sentiment (no matter how vaguely linked the two are). It is our absolute obligation to take responsibility for the governments we have elected and supported, and their decisions about finances. Otherwise, we have fallen for the oldest trick in the political book. While Bush and company yell ‘fire!’ in the Middle Eastern theatre, Americans must cut through rhetoric and see this government’s real motives. For America’s greatest power lies not in foreign oil or Masonic temples, but in the most important tool we have as members of a democratic society to decide what we do with our own tax dollars – our vote. End.