Paradoxes of the Republican Revolution. The Republicans are taking their slim majority entirely too seriously, and attempting to saddle the Nation with unpopular judges for decades, change the rules of the Senate permanently, trap people in usurious debt forever, and otherwise ride roughshod over the sensibilities of the minority as tho they are the permanent majority and minorities have no rights.
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That is not our tradition.
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The Democrats chose to lose the last election by going out of their way not to discuss debt or bankruptcy "reform" (revolution), presumably because the only way to show the Nation how vicious the Republicans are and how disastrous their rule would be, was to let them win and enact their program.
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Democrats visualized a Nation trapped in war, debt, and cultural division, so filled with strident disaffection and desperation that the electorate would shake its head "What have we done?" and turn against the Republicans for a generation.
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The Republican Revolution is filled with contradictions. For instance, "conservatives" are intent on reforming the rules of the Senate ("the world's greatest deliberative body") to reduce its power to make the Nation think twice, largely for the sake of putting women onto federal appellate courts. Think about this. Is putting women in charge of society, over men, a conservative value? or a Radical Left, Communist value?
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The United States didn't even give women the right to vote until 1920. Now the Republican Party's "conservatives" are aggressively promoting the idea that women should dominate the courts of the United States. That's a conservative, family-oriented value? dragging women away from their families and putting them over men? What about all those female soldiers in our military? Is teaching women to kill men, women, and children a conservative value? Is taking military careers away from men and giving them to women, putting women officers over men who have no choice but to obey or be court-martialed, even shot for mutiny, a conservative value?
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Republican social conservatives are fiscal radicals, racking up the greatest budgetary deficits in the history of the Nation. In the past 24 years, the only surpluses the federal government has run were under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
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Reagan more than tripled the national debt; Bush the Elder added almost another third. So after 12 years of Republican "conservatives", the national debt had quadrupled.
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Bush the Younger took the greatest surplus in the history of the world and turned it into the greatest deficit in the history of the world — in 8 months.
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Check the figures yourself at the U.S. Treasury website, http://www.treas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/fed-debt.shtml.
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The national debt for the first year (1981) that Ronald Reagan, great hero of "conservatives", held office, was $994,845 million. When he left shortly after the end of 1988, it had risen to $2,601,307 million, an increase of 261%.
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Then Bush the Elder took office thru 1992, and continued the profligate spending of the Reagan years. In 1992, the national debt stood at $4,002,123 million ($4.002 trillion). In 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration, the national debt had been $994,845 million. 12 years of "conservative" rule had quadrupled the national debt.
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By contrast, in the first year of the Clinton Administration (1993), the Nation suffered a national debt of $4,351,403 million. Burdened by the legacy of the Reagan Revolution's tax cuts for the rich, which Clinton could not/did not reverse, the national debt rose over eight years to $5,686,338 million in the year 2000, an increase of only 31%. And at the end of the Clinton years, even without restoring the tax levels before Reagan's Plutocratic Revolution, the Democrats had turned a huge deficit into a huge surplus. Damned liberals!
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The debt has continued to grow less quickly since the Democrats left office, but last year's deficit was the largest in history.

For that fiscal year, the government recorded a $412 billion deficit, the largest ever in nominal dollar terms, although not as large as some of the deficits of the 1980s [the Reagan-Bush years] when measured against the size of the economy. * * * Wall Street analysts reduced their deficit forecasts this week, from around $400 billion to around $370 billion. In nominal dollar terms, that would still be the third-highest deficit on record.

Who pays the national debt? Taxpayers. Who receives the payments? The rich, because the rich own the debt. We don't really "owe ourselves" the money. The whole of society owes only the owners of the debt instruments (Treasury bonds and the like), and essentially only the rich own such instruments, tho some bonds are in pension funds. The national debt is essentially a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.
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The rich have objected to a progressive income tax because it is a redistribution of wealth — from the rich to the rest of us. They are pushing for a "flat tax", by means of which they who make more can keep more — and the rest of us will have to take up the slack — by pretending it would be "simpler" and "fairer". They are hoping that the uneducated losers who have given the Republicans their (temporary) majority can be fooled all the time.
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After all, Lincoln, the first Republican President, warned only that you can't fool all the people all the time. Today's Republicans are pretty confident they can fool most of the people all the time.
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The rich, for whom the Republicans are agent, don't mind a regressive redistribution of wealth, from the rest of us to the rich. You see, "class warfare" is okay with Republicans as long as it is one-sided, in the form of regressive taxation and debt service, in which the rich are constantly aggressing against the rest of us. That's never to be called "class warfare". But if the rest fite back, that is "class warfare", and we should be ashamed of ourselves for promoting 'class hatreds' and 'divisions'.
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Dividing society on the basis of religious/heathen, Christian/Moslem/Jewish, "born again"/benighted, heterosexual/deviate, Amuricans/furriners, etc.? Well, that's just fine. But we mustn't divide the Nation into economic classes and promote the notion that the rich are taking over everything, so must be stopped.
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The Republican Revolution is premised on the idea that while the Nation is distracted and divided by irrelevancies such as gay marriage, the rich can crush everyone under their heel and render everyone into wage slaves and debt slaves who will be so scared of losing their jobs that they will take cuts in pay and benefits and take over all tax responsibilities from the rich so that the rich can live in mansions while the rest of us will beg to be their butlers and maids. Of course, they won't want to see the hovels the rest of society lives in, so the poor will have to commute an hour or more to get to the gated estates where they will work as slaves. And all the while they are miserable and crushed by debt, the fear they have of losing their job and home will be displaced onto homosexuals and atheists and illegal aliens — anywhere but where it belongs: the rich. Because if ever people wake up to see they're being played for fools, they will crush the rich, impose steeply progressive taxation to level the playing field, pay off the national debt to the rich with taxes taken from the rich themselves, outlaw usury, demand good jobs with good pay and good benefits, and make this country what it seemed, around 1920, it was going to be: a classless society in which people of all kinds could live and prosper together. That is The Great Republican Nitemare.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,624.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:31 PM