Sometime last week in the course of the media’s gluttonous consumption of Sarah Palin, she expressed her view that government is not the answer to everything—implying, quite reasonably but inaccurately, that her opponents believe it is exactly that.
In fact, as a now rabid supporter of the Democratic ticket my concern is not that government answer EVERYTHING but that it shift what it answers, and in particular what it spends our money for.
My counterparts on the right (footnote: try finding a neutral synonym for “opponent,” “adversary,” that doesn’t connote “enemy”)
OK. My counterparts on the right ASSUME that the military is sacrosanct. So in the same way that my fellow lefties view social security as off limits and inviolable, these Republicans never mention the military budget when speaking of cutting federal spending. Instead, McCain, Palin, Bush, and others pontificate on the government’s obligation to protect the people from enemies.
(Equal time: Democrats rarely invoke the enormous cost of social security. They invoke the sacred obligation to fulfill promises and protect people from hard times.)
Here’s the interesting thing. The right’s version of “protection” includes fetal life and military security. The left’s emphasizes health (certainly an implied sub-category of “life” as a constitutional right and core value), privacy, humane incarceration (including no torture), education (a key component in this economy of “happiness”), the environment (without a healthy ecology life will no longer exist . . . period).
My point is that Palin’s formulation—“government is the left’s answer to everything” –distorts reality. It’s not a question of more or less spending—the Bush budget with its enormous growth and deficits due to military spending proves this emphatically. Instead, left and right offer different clusters of issues and circumstances for which government should provide solutions. And, as a consequence, when they “save” money, they will save it in different areas.
McCain and Palin want to reduce the size of government while maintaining the colossal military expenditures. (If you’re interested, there are some excellent visual representations available to demonstrate how current military budgets dwarf all other expenditures outside the so-called entitlements<http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm>, <http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending>, <http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php>.) The candidates speak with moral superiority of eliminating “ear marks”—those are the monies you re-elect your representatives to bring home (the “bridge to nowhere” being a prime example). They will almost certainly suggest some level of privatization for future social security (and please remember what’s happening to your stocks right now when you consider whether that should be the basis for “security” in your children’s futures). The only other areas to cut spending are domestic programs, and that’s a code for “programs that help the poor, defend endangered species and environments, support the arts, and so on.
Obama will be hard-pressed to reduce military spending not only because he (like McCain) will inherit wars already in progress—including, it seems likely this morning—one in Pakistan but also because our economy is so militarized (the military industrial complex is no myth) that to reduce spending on the military you have to figure out what to do for hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans who build weapons and war planes—and not only for the U.S.— to earn their paychecks.
But Obama’s approach will be to seek ways to do that—partly, as Obama has said, by encouraging development of greener energies and industries. And they will want to hold the line on military spending while protecting—if we’re lucky, expanding somewhat– the protections poorer and border-line poor Americans depend on for maintaining a decent quality of life. Democrats will be hard-pressed to do much in this area. But their philosophy will not necessarily be to expand government. Their approach will be to apply its advantages as a giant and over-arching institution and, yes, collector of money, in ways best-suited to its strengths. These include the environment and the social net. Personally, I think education should remain local; the federal government may set the tone but should not attempt to impose achievement and other standards on the states and localities.
Democrats regard the environment as appropriate for federal activity because too many aspects of environment (air, water e.g.) cross state boundaries and many more local actions have consequences that touch the rest of the nation, even the globe, profoundly and irrevocably. Another of these is the grand social net. In part, our mobile society requires a federal answer to generally balancing incomes. This is a now antique (but forgotten mostly) insight from the social activists of the thirties to the fifties. They realized that if New York chooses to take care of its poor while Pennsylvania chooses not to, the poor from Pennsylvania (or Tennessee or wherever) are likely to descend on New York in droves, straining the limits of its charity. The same applies to healthcare, which is not just for the poor.
As a leftist, I do believe government in some sense is the best answer to providing healthcare for all Americans and, yes, to reduce costs somewhat in the process. That view fits nicely with my view that the elderly should not have to be homeless and penniless, at the mercy of failing pensions, risky stock markets (how’s your nest egg doing this month?) and so forth. I won’t get into how much protection that should be, but suffice it to say that I believe the “right to life” ought to include some level of quality. So just as the unwanted child who ends up abused should be protected from beatings, the elderly person with no other resources should be allowed the dignity of “deserving” and receiving at least enough to “get by.” Personally, I don’t have trouble with pro-life—except when it forces a woman to carry a dead child to term or to risk her life for it or to bear for nine months the reminder of a traumatic sexual assault. But if you’re pro-life (as my pastor pointed out just last week), how can you be pro-capitol punishment? And, by extension, how can you condemn those you insist on bringing to term to sub-standard housing, with wages so low they are unlivable, and often the near certainty of prison time based on your color and your neighborhood demographics?
If you can’t do that (and I can’t), then you have to look at the pile of money and the size of the problems and seek solutions. Some solutions will without doubt have to come from private charity. But some solutions are better imposed either by statute and regulation (which cost money to enforce) or by direct expenditure on programs (which cost money for actually delivery of services). My impression is that those of you who can rationalize leaving such folks to fend for themselves or to depend on wonderful but inadequate private charities, will look at that same pile as the price of protection from terrorists and illegal immigration.
I’ll leave aside for the moment whether that’s a good idea and offer a bargain: I’ll agree to stringent oversight for social programs and to seeking ways to streamline the federal bureaucracies that fund them etc. etc. But you must agree to examine the military budget with a careful eye to cutting spending.
Peace, as others have observed, is not merely the absence of war. Life (at least life worth living) is more than the presence of a heartbeat. However, enemies exist—and opponents who might become enemies exist. The job of government is to fulfill the roles most suited to its nature as our collective pocketbook. Of course, we want to be safe from terrorists. But let’s go back to asking what’s the best way to do that. Should we invade a country, take over its government (to prevent a vacuum) and spend 10 billion dollars a day for five or more years on an experiment in nation-building? Or should we arrange for protection of our borders (in airports, bus terminals etc) while exercising the best diplomacy money can buy and redistributing some of the military’s budget toward giving us economic security—not only in the form of direct social programs and health care but also in the form of job retraining, appropriate federal action on education and protection of vulnerable cities from disasters?
That’s what I’d do. And I guarantee, it can be done without raising the cost of doing the country’s business.
