Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [133]
THE GUTS OF GOVERNMENT are still and always: Who pays? Who benefits? Tax. And spend. It’s still the economy, stupid, but more than that, our ability to solve all the other problems hinges on the economy. It’s pointless to talk about fixing the schools or about health care or the environment or cities or urban sprawl or children’s issues or any of dozens of other issues in a vacuum. The solutions, the improvements, are all dependent on the economy.
Normally, one can have a peppy debate about the economy—let’s do this, let’s try that, no, you’re crazy, we need to try something else entirely. But we are at a strange point here, where before we try anything, we need the economic equivalent of the key on the computer that says “undo.” Delete. The Bush tax cuts are an economic disaster. The first round was horrible, and the second is, incredibly, worse—such an overt, unconscionable, stupid redistribution of income from the bottom to the top that it alone restores class warfare to a legitimate position in American political debate.
An economic recession can be ameliorated by both tax cuts and by increased government spending, but Bush is doing the wrong kind of both. A recession, in the old example from your Economics 101 textbook, is when you own four factories and one of them is sitting idle. If you give tax cuts to working- and middle-class citizens, they will run right out and spend it, thus pushing up demand, thus enabling you to reopen your fourth factory. If you give tax cuts to the wealthy, they may invest the money in a fifth factory, which will also stand idle because of lack of demand, or they may save the money, since they don’t need anything, or they may buy a polo pony with it. Giving tax cuts to working- and middle-class people is the simplest, more direct way to dig the economy out of a recession. The other way is by “priming the pump” with government spending. What you’re looking for in government spending is projects that create jobs. Military spending is not the most effective way to boost the economy, despite the military-industrial complex’s vast annual lobbying of Congress on the subject. True, building planes, guns, and tanks provides jobs, but then what good are they? They kill people. Whereas putting money into schools, dams, bridges, mass transit, water systems, sewage systems—the whole clump of public building known as infrastructure—not only provides jobs but also leaves us with dandy things that work to improve the general welfare—as it says we are to do in the Constitution. Bill Clinton had a pip of an idea about how to fix America’s schools, almost half of which are either dilapidated or falling apart. He wanted to issue tax-free federal bonds for the purpose, an attractive investment and terrific social investment at the same time. He was shut down by the Congress.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Department of Education, cities and their metro regions now have $2 trillion of neglected physical-infrastructure needs stacked up. Their neglect causes all kinds of burdens on citizens and public employees, as well as significant energy and environmental costs. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher who was popular in the 1950s, once observed that the real genius of Americans is maintenance, taking care of things. Although we have a reputation as a throwaway society, maintenance of public facilities is critical. During New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, the