Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [22]
Tom Frank says the free-market fundamentalists are “puffed up by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure it might have been lifted from The God That Failed, that old book written by ex-Communists disavowing their former convictions.” The free-market fundamentalists and “movement conservatives” are just as blinded by ideology as the old Communists. They worship at the altar of the free market, blind to a country where the government is redistributing resources from the poor and the middle class to the rich. This is open class warfare. This country is not working for most of the people in it. The health-care system is falling apart, the social safety net has been shredded, the Bushies want to privatize Social Security and the schools. These are the same ideological geniuses who brought you the savings-and-loan scandals, $2 trillion in deficits, the California electricity crisis, Enron, WorldCom—in fact, it’s the same loser laissez-faire ideology that produced the Great Depression. The free market is a wonderful thing—but it functions well only within a nest of law and regulation. When those who are regulated by the government buy the government, the people get screwed.
Taxes, of course, are only one half of the perpetual struggle in government, the other being spending. Very simple under Bush. The military and homeland security get more, everything else gets cut. The term compassionate conservative is a bitter joke. Try this one: the late Paul Wellstone sponsored a bill that said no government contracts related to homeland security could go to companies that use foreign tax havens to avoid U.S. taxes. Sayonara, sucker. C’mon, what do you think these campaign contributions buy? That bill was deader than same-sex marriage in the Texas Legislature.
This administration has put in new eligibility requirements that make it more difficult for low-income families to obtain a range of government benefits, including housing programs, Medicaid, the school-lunch program, education, preschool programs (let’s hear it for the Education President), foreign aid, the EPA, veterans—hey, I hate when that happens. Meal programs for seniors: 36,000 cut off. Home heating: 532,000 cut off. Homeless kids cut off education programs: 8,000. Kids cut off after-school programs: 50,000. Kids cut off child care: 33,000. Good thing the country is being run by compassionate Christians, eh?
According to the White House itself, the total cost of the second round of Bush tax cuts is at least $50 billion a year for the next decade. That is enough to pay for a prescription-drug plan under Medicare, enough to provide health insurance to every child in America, and more than enough to pass every major homeland-security proposal made by experts in the field, according to Representative David Obey.
B RAPOPORT SWEPT an interviewer off to the Rapoport Academy, the charter school run by their foundation. Charter schools were a pet project of Governor George W. Bush. Unfortunately, since Bush is not interested in policy, the original law was so carelessly written and contained so little oversight (because government regulation is always bad), we had a series of disasters in which people who were incompetent and/or crooked took huge chunks of the state’s money to start schools that either never opened, couldn’t educate a Labrador retriever, or wound up in some fantastic fiscal flameout. It took a liberal to make the idea work.
This is a magical place. The school has 150 students, chosen by lottery from the poorest kids in Waco. They are almost all black. The average family income of the students is $6,000 a year. A few are special-ed kids with physical handicaps; some