Change … Change … Change!

Not long ago I read what was, supposedly, a joke … It said all the politicians running for president are promising change to the American people. We send them billions and billions of tax dollars and they send us the change.

Funny?  Not really; there is too much truth in it to be funny.

And every day, I receive candidate-bashing cartoons, stupid, political one-liners about lipstick wearing pigs, hockey mom’s, etc.  C’mon folks!!  Give it a rest!!  Instead of bashing the crap out of one candidate while touting another & generally forcing your unsolicited opinions on others, think about this…………………

They ALL promise change.

How about if they run on a promise of restoration rather than change. A restoration that would take us back in time to a place where things ran better, smoother and life was more enjoyable.

Change?  That, in truth, is what they have been giving us all along.

We USE to have a strong dollar … Politicians changed that.

Life USE to be sacred … Politicians changed that.

Marriage USE to be sacred … Politicians are changing that.

We USE to be respected around the world … Politicians changed that.

We USE to have a strong manufacturing economy … Politicians changed that.

We USE to have lower tax structures … Politicians changed that.

We USE to enjoy more freedoms … Politicians changed that.

We USE to be a large exporter of American made goods … Politicians changed that.

We USED to be an OPENLY Christian nation … Politicians changed that.

We USE to teach patriotism in schools … Politicians changed that.

We USE to educate children in schools … Politicians changed that.

We USED to enjoy freedom of speech … Politicians changed that.

We USE to ENFORCE  LEGAL citizenship … Politicians changed that.

We USE to have affordable food & gas prices … Politicians changed that, too. … and one could go on and on with this list.

What hasn’t been changed, politicians are promising to change that as well if you will elect them.

When, oh WHEN, is America going to sit back with open eyes and look at what we once were and where we have come and say, enough is enough?

The trouble is, America’s youthful voters today don’t know of the great America that existed forty and fifty years ago. They see the world as if it has always existed, as it is now.

When will we wake up?  Tomorrow may be too late.

When will America realize …

 

Politicians are what is wrong with America?

 

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The Next President’s Due Bill

By David S. Broder
Sunday, September 14, 2008; B07

Every so often, reality has to intrude on politics. The candidates, of course, resent it and do their damnedest to avoid it. And those of us who make a living reporting politics are equally determined not to let the harsh truths of the outside world impinge on the “game” being played out on the campaign trail.

Last week, just as everyone was settling in to weigh the delightful prospect of a new administration and a new Congress — reformers all, to hear them tell it — a cold-water dash of realism smacked us in the face.

This one was administered by the killjoys at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who announced that the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance — a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign.

Barack Obama and John McCain scarcely blinked at the news; I didn’t really expect them to do anything more. The last thing candidates want to admit is that, if they win, they will be unable to deliver the goodies they have promised the voters.

Both of them are telling their audiences that they will outdo the Bush administration in every respect. They will not only bring fundamental change to Washington but deliver the big goals everyone craves — peace and enhanced national respect abroad, energy independence, more jobs, affordable health care, a cleaner environment, improved schools and, of course, lower taxes.

You will not hear them admit that, before they do any of those things, they will have to pay a gigantic annual interest bill on the rapidly expanding national debt — or else our foreign creditors will stop lending us the money to pay our bills.

No one is going to be elected on the promise that he will satisfy the bankers in Shanghai and the money managers in Moscow.

But that is the reality. Our country has so thoroughly abandoned any pretense of fiscal prudence, accumulating public and private debt at a breakneck pace, that no president can avoid asking: How do I keep our creditors at bay?

If this were a rational world, that question would be at the top of the agenda for the first presidential debate, for it will be inescapable when the work of governing begins in earnest in January.

It is not being asked now, because it is in no one’s interest to raise it — not Obama’s and not McCain’s, for they have no easy answers, and not the media’s, because we, too, hate to be the jerks who spoil the party by asking who’s paying for the booze.

But trust me, the question will have to be asked in 2009, if not in 2008. The events that have dominated the economic news — soaring unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure rates; government bailouts of giant financial firms — are not accidental occurrences. They are symptoms of a systemic breakdown marked by easy credit, lax spending discipline and a toxic aversion to taxing ourselves enough to pay our bills.

The fine print in the CBO report measures the course of our reckless imprudence. The projected deficit is almost triple the size of last year’s flow of red ink. In January, the deficit for this year was estimated at “only” $219 billion, and both Bush and the Democratic Congress claimed that we were on our way to a balanced budget in another three years.

More mythmaking. The reality: A slowing economy sapped federal revenue. An “economic stimulus” bill boosted spending, while Iraq and Afghanistan continued to absorb more billions. In the face of that, Bush continues to call for more extended tax cuts, and Democrats, playing along with the polls, are poised to go along.

It’s unfair in a way that those who will move into new positions on Pennsylvania Avenue in January should bear the consequences of the decisions made or avoided by their predecessors. But that is the reality; economic forces do not obey election timetables.

And reality does intrude, no matter how much the politicians try to deny it.

davidbroder@washpost.com

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What Makes People Vote Republican?

By Jonathan Haidt, Edge. Posted September 16, 2008.

Not everyone who votes Republican has been ‘duped’. Conservative ideals appeal to some because they reflect heartfelt visions of a ‘good society.’

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity” — a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the “war on terror” and repeal of the “death tax”) that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: “disgusts me” (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and “disgusts me less” (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can’t find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group — college students at Penn — consistently exemplified Turiel’s definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like “it’s wrong because … um … eating dog meat would make you sick” or “it’s wrong to use the flag because … um … the rags might clog the toilet.”

These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel’s description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups — the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. (”Your dog is family, and you just don’t eat family.”) From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder’s ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see — let alone respect — a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29-year-old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about.

My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.

It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a loud voice saying “Look, you tell him that this is the compartment over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it.”

Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to “thicken up” the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.

On Turiel’s definition of morality (”justice, rights, and welfare”), Christian and Hindu communities don’t look good. They restrict people’s rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with “real” morality. But isn’t it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?

Here’s my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don’t understand about morality.

First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other’s rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama’s calls for “unity”) to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.

Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.

But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that “Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.” A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for outgroups.

A Durkheimian ethos can’t be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever “lost” him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

In several large Internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane — of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.

The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words “God” and “faith.” But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals — each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum (”from many, one”). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights?

The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that “we are all one” is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people’s sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity.

The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual “deviance,” but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity.

The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to “question authority” and assert that “dissent is patriotic,” Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be “soft on crime” has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who “work hard and play by the rules.” But if you don’t do it at all — if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers — then you are committing a kind of sacrilege.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

 

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The Bankrupting of America

Sacred Order of the Fish Head

5/27/08 12:09 AM

No matter where you get your news, it seems that the pitiful state of the American economy is the front and center story. One day it’s the foreclosure rate. On another day it’s about a major financial institution getting bailed out by the Fed. The most telling, however, was the article I found about tent cities going up in the Los Angeles area. This is particularly disturbing, especially when you look back at where this country was before George Bush took office.

When President Clinton took office, we were operating in deficit mode in part because of the disastrous economic policies of the Reagan-Bush (George H.W.) years. In August of 1993, President Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which raised taxes on the wealthiest 1.2% of taxpayers and lowered the taxes on 15 million low-income families. It also made tax cuts available to 90% of small businesses and reigned in spending. By 1998, the United States had its first surplus in 42 years. Now, everyone knows that all administrations take credit for these kinds of statistics, and the Clinton administration was no exception. While it was a number of converging factors that led to the surplus, such as the economy outperforming estimates and cutting the interest on the federal debt, the Clinton package was certainly one of the factors that contributed to the economic recovery. In 2000, the year George W. Bush was elected, the United States had a surplus of $237 billion dollars. It was Clinton’s third consecutive surplus year, and the largest surplus in history.⁽¹⁾ Fast-forward eight years and look around. What do you see?

A fiscal meltdown of titanic proportions

A $237 billion dollar surplus is now officially a $9+ trillion deficit. Some estimate that national debt has increased an average $1.65 billion per day since September 29, 2006. Another web site, http://www.truthin2008.com, states that the government keeps two sets of books and the actual deficit number is $55 trillion and growing. The site is not merely an offspring of the “liberal media.” It is a product of the Institute for Truth in Accounting and the information on the site has been confirmed by the outgoing Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker, who states, “we have been diagnosed with fiscal cancer.” The institute calls for openness in dealing with the deficit issue and calls for the American public to find out if the candidates know how much we are really in the hole for and what plans each has to deal with it.

Whether the real deficit number is $9 trillion or $55 trillion, the economy is in dismal shape all the way around. As he has done with so many issues facing the American people during the past seven years, President Bush continues to minimize the situation. He touts the 52 months of uninterrupted job growth that his administration has delivered. The fact is that his job growth performance is anemic. Bush has created only 5.9 million jobs in seven years (or 72,000 jobs per month). By this time in his administration, Bill Clinton had created 20.2 million new jobs (or 246,600 per month) and he did it by investing in America. Our own Mr. Optimism is competing with his father for the worst record of job growth since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. He goes on insisting that his ineffectual economic stimulus package will take care of bolstering the sagging economy.

How did things get this bad?

How we got here is a bone of contention. Bush supporters say we can’t lay all of the economic woes at his feet. Some want to blame the sub-prime mortgage meltdown entirely. It is certainly one factor, but beware laying the blame here as some economists are tying Bush’s tax cuts to this folly. Yet, even if we take the position that the economy was slowing down when George Bush took office, his fiscal irresponsibility on a number of fronts has directly led to this economic meltdown. Furthermore, anyone who believes that the money we are funneling into Iraq and Afghanistan has nothing to do with the failing economy is out of touch. Prior to the Iraq invasion, President Bush went on national television and insisted that this war would be quick and inexpensive as wars go. We were going to be greeted by the Iraqi people as liberators. We’d be in and out. I still have the image in my mind of George Bush in airman get-up landing on the deck of a carrier and proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” That was the furthest thing from the truth.

Today the endless war in Iraq is being waged at a price of $12.5 billion per month. When you add in the long-term bills as a result of the war, such as disability payments for veterans, it looks more like $25 billion per month. The total economic cost for the Iraq war through 2008 is estimated at $1.3 trillion. This war is not creating jobs for the American people. It is, however, creating tidy little profits for businesses like Halliburton, Blackwater USA (our own freelance mercenary army), and KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root). To add insult to the economic injury, KBR, our leading Iraq contractor, avoids paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring employees through two Cayman Island shell companies. The Defense Department has known this since 2004 and approves because it means KBR can do the work more cheaply. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s worst fears about an out-of-control military-industrial complex are coming to fruition.

Simultaneous to waging this fiscal albatross, President Bush has handed out $2 trillion in tax relief over the past seven years, primarily to those who need it the least. This has never been done while the United States was at war. The revenue from the tax cuts should be going toward offsetting the war’s staggering costs. What is most disturbing of all is that this president does not include the total amount needed to fight the war in his yearly budgets. Instead, he routinely handles this as “emergency spending” which keeps it out of the normal budget channels. At the time of this writing, President Bush is about to ask the Congress for another $107 billion for the war. Where does this emergency money come from? We borrow it from China and other countries, compounding the size of the deficit. These deceptive practices, and Bush’s disastrous fiscal policies, are carried through in his $3.1 trillion budget for 2009.

Bush’s bunker busting 2009 budget

The 2009 budget calls for President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to be made permanent. These cuts are aimed at the top 20% of earners in the country and not at the majority of American families whose income has remained flat (or even declined) during his administration. It is in the hands of the average American family that the tax cut will stimulate the economy. These families will spend the money on past-due bills and items of necessity, like food and clothing. The rich will not spend the money. They will bank it or invest it. They already have everything they need. Bush’s proposed tax cuts will cost the country more than half a trillion dollars in revenue over the next five years and more than $2 trillion over the next decade

The 2009 budget also calls for an 8.1% increase in Pentagon spending ($518.3 billion) plus an additional $70 billion to fight the war on terror. Again, these numbers do not reflect the full amount needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will continue to be treated as “emergency spending.” Consider how many times President Bush has gone to Congress for money in 2007 and already in 2008. He is about to ask for yet another $107 billion. Should we really believe that $70 billion is enough in 2009? In the meantime, President Bush managed to cut Medicare by $208 billion over the next five years, and trimmed $18 billion right off the top in 2009 by cutting, of course, various education, training, highway and environmental programs (domestic programs where investment would create jobs).

It’s time to stop the bleeding

President Bush glibly states that the deficit is temporary and we’ll be operating in the black by 2012. Those Americans who fail to tie the state of the economy to the burgeoning cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unnecessary tax cuts to the rich point to this with optimism. They are delusional. Our imperial president bases this ridiculous projection on not needing more than $70 billion to continue fighting the wars in 2009 (a silly assumption when you consider how many times he’s asked for money on an emergency basis) and on a sunny economic forecast that says the U.S. economy will grow at 2.7% in 2008. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects U.S. growth at significantly lower rate: 1.5% in 2008. Americans should be made aware that this level of performance could actually add $250+ billion to the deficit over the next five years rather than reducing it.

President Bush has bankrupted America and the Congress has given him carte blanche to do so by continuing to fund the war. The timid Democrats simply do not want to be accused of not supporting the troops, particularly during an election year. However, even if the Congress cut off funding today, there would still be enough money allocated to keep the war going for another full year. The Congress should stand tall and cut fiscal support for this war, starting with Bush’s upcoming request for $107 billion. It should also let the tax cuts to the rich expire. This revenue could be used to invest in the very domestic programs President Bush continues to cut. We could hire more teachers, police officers, even border patrol agents. We could invest in infrastructure improvements to our bridges, tunnels and roads, investments that are sorely needed. These are the programs that will actually create jobs, stimulate the economy and, perhaps, even jump-start a recovery.

(1) Office of Management and Budget, National Economic Council (9/27/00)