Our country has a humongous deficit. Did you know? By the time this reaches print, it will be close to $16 trillion. I did not check, but if you stacked that many $1 bills, it would reach Saturn.
This could be one way of solving the problem: print more money. However that would lessen the value of the dollars already this side of the Treasury’s presses. So we rule that out as an option.
What do you do when your family has a deficit, when income does not meet expenses? You can’t print money even with a good photocopier, so you do two things: make more income and cut back on expenses. Most family financiers know that you must do both. It would not be enough to do only one. The trick is to spread the sacrifice so that fairness trumps our usual tendency to gouge the people who have no one to plead their cause, the poor. We figure if we cut back on the anti-poverty programs, we the non-poor would not be hurt by belt-tightening. Congress with all its works and pomps does not represent them especially well.
Likewise, we demand that there be no tax increase on the wealthy. We argue that it would be enough to slash and burn Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, education funding, WIC and the rest of the safety net that keeps a whole population segment from drowning. We keep hearing how extravagant and wasteful those many programs are. We want to copy Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister, whose austerity efforts crippled the economy, but we say we won’t make her mistakes.
Fairly increasing the taxes of the rich is, by some great leap of logic, a bad idea, says the middle class. It would not hurt those with documented greater gains over the past decade than those of everyone else. Even billionaires like Warren Buffet say it should be done. But why do middle class people fight higher taxes for the rich so vehemently when this is a solution that would better their own lives? The answer is that it would allow the camel’s nose under the tent. Before you know it, taxes on the middle class would follow suit. Better to hit the poor. They’re defenseless. We show we believe this by our vilifying health insurance for all, the kind other industrialized nations enacted decades ago. As a result, health costs threaten to strangle us.
How did we get here? A trillion-dollar war of choice, based on weapons of mass destruction that have yet to be found, still has to be paid for since we have not provided for that. Besides, staggering tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 for the rich cut off enormous revenue. The thinking was that the rich, now unencumbered with oppressive taxes (among the lightest in the industrialized world that does not spend on military luxuries as we do), would build factories to multiply their wealth, thereby making jobs for the rest of us.
That is a nice rationalization, except that the wealthy do not build factories as they used to. They invest money, often overseas. They are not like you and me, as Scott Fitzgerald said. Where we benefit everyone by putting money back into circulation immediately for food and clothing, they put away their excess, not always in investments that benefit the rest of America.
The American bishops have taught that a national budget is a moral document. As such they have eminent competence to criticize it. So do we. If it legislates suffering for the poor and a free lunch for the rich, that is wrong. All too often traditional worshippers hesitate to hold political leaders accountable even though in a democracy they represent us and our choices. We withdraw from petitioning them to make moral choices in things as secular as a budget. We too frequently allow them to placate us with partisan rhetoric more intended to get someone reelected rather than to provide for the common good.
This latter has turned into a Marxist slogan by partisans who accuse proponents of a socially responsible budget, saying that we do not want America to become another Scandinavia, where there is cradle to grave social care for all, but where the taxes make ours look like Sunday school.
The problem is that in our country we have a chasm between the rich with their middle-class posse – and everybody else.
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