Letter 2 America for August 6, 2013

Dear America,

With all the fuss over A-Rod's suspension and The President's potential appointment of Larry Summers as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, perhaps the most important issue of the day is going un-discussed.  If nothing changes between now and October 1, the government will at least potentially shutdown for want of a federal budget and the appropriations that send the money in the budget to the departments where it is needed.  It's the debt ceiling again, and this time, the dispute isn't just between the parties.  This time it is between the two houses of our bicameral legislature as well.  Each house--The Senate and The House of Representatives--has an appropriations committee, and before a debt ceiling can be approved by the two houses, it has to be agreed upon, and the two houses are presently about $91 billion apart.  That $91 billion is the amount of the sequester that devolved from last years' debt ceiling fight, and it has become the operating position of the conservative, Republican-controlled House of Representatives.  Of course, everyone says that sequester is a bad idea...including House Republicans.  But since it is already in place, they take it as a given and will resist appropriations exceeding their budget figure of $967 billion, even if it means shutting down the government because it can no longer borrow to fund all of the federal deficit.  This must sound familiar because the only thing that has changed is that the Republicans have the sequester...already a matter of law...on which to stand this time.  Once more, Democratic concessions are like chickens coming home to roost, and it is likely that once more, there will have to be Democratic concessions...unless...

My position now is that if the government has to shut down rather than allowing further cuts imposed on the people who can least bear them, let it happen.  Shut down the airports that the rich fly out of and the harbors where they dock their yachts.  Stop processing applications for oil drilling permits and start bringing the troops home from Afghanistan a few months early.  If the key to "getting our fiscal house in order," as the Republicans like to put it, is cutting everything, let's make it hurt everyone...everyone who will vote in November 2014.  I believe that the Republican electoral tide has been stemmed, and I also believe that even registered Republican voters are coming to see that at some point fiscal restraint becomes partisan obstinacy, and sane judgment is no longer sane, and the result may well be Republicans voting Democrat.  The United States has made these annual pilgrimages to the brink of governmental chaos too regularly...and with too many consequences...for people to ignore the fact that, while more abstemious government spending may be desirable, parsimony is destructive.  As a nation, we are more than the Darwinian model that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney ran on, and we Americans are beginning to awaken to the Faustian nature of the bargain that those conservatively oriented politicians would have us strike.  We cannot buy prosperity with the very marrow of the poor, and doing so for the sole purpose of enriching the rich on the theory that their patronage will enrich us all is doubly reprehensible, not to mention demonstrably irrational, and I think that more and more people are seeing it that way.

So this fight over the debt ceiling is slightly more evolved than was the debate that we witnessed each of the last three years.  Finally, we are getting to the point at which the moral issues will be raised, and we will have to face ourselves and define our ethos honestly.  At this moment in our history, we are at a particularly pivotal juncture.  Our economy is stumbling forward, but at some point that stumbling may become another fall if more isn't done to sustain its momentum.  Similarly, once the reform of "welfare as we knew it" occurred, an erstwhile unnoticed phenomenon occurred with it.  Without welfare, which is now limited in duration, we as a people have to turn to other programs to sustain those who are intractably without resources, including the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly, the infirm and children whose parents are among the former groups.  The spectacle of people without resources dieing in the streets is not one we will see in this nation until callousness is the rule rather than the creed of only those on one far end of the political spectrum.  Thus, unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Medicare, Food Stamps and similar programs have been utilized to accomplish what welfare used to, resulting in the same costs to tax payers of not more.  You can't get something for nothing, and taxes have had to keep pace with need through other programs.  Despite the fact that welfare costs per se are reduced, other costs have been incurred with extensions in the unemployment insurance eligibility of those who cannot find work, for example.  There has been much talk about our grandchildren and the legacy we are creating for them by paying those costs, but I believe that many of us are no longer focused exclusively on that future generation.  Some Americans don't want their grandchildren to live in the America that the Tea Party and Paul Ryan envision.  They want their grandchildren to live in our grandmothers' America, in which people saw to it that others got fed and that everyone was warm enough to survive long, cold winters.  What we have lost in the name of money is more valuable than individual wealth.  What we have lost is our commitment to the common weal, and it is going to be interesting to see whether the Republicans in The House learned anything from the loss they suffered from a perceived position of strength in 2012.  I have asked this question before, and usually on the eve of what I construed to be a pivotal election: 2008, 2010 and then 2012.  In those three elections the pendulum has swung nearly one full cycle in the aggregate.  Now we'll see if it continues to swing back to where it was in 2006, and that will be the best indicator yet of how this country will continue to evolve.  Are we gravitating toward a new Roosevelt or a new Reagan; the harbinger of that trend will be in the debt ceiling debate.

Your friend,

Mike