notconspir

Issue #62

Last Update February 28, 2009

National Not a Conspiracy by Gerry Krownstein February 20, 2008 Conspiracy theories are -unnecessary – human stupidity is enough to explain most of what is going on. Still, looking back on the last seven years .... When Bill Clinton left office, the US was at peace, had a high standing in world opinion, and an unchallenged dollar. The government was running a surplus, and was threatening to start paying down the national debt. It seems like a fairy-tail era, now. Yet, forces were working as hard as they could to get rid of all the positives.. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Allan Greenspan, began issuing dire predictions that using the surplus to reduce the debt could lead to a depression. A steady drumbeat of conservative rhetoric (“it's not the government's money, it belongs to the people, and should be returned to them in the form of tax cuts”) pushed to avoid repayment of the national debt. When George W.- Bush took office, this attitude prevailed, and major tax cuts, mainly benefiting the top of the economic pyramid, were enacted by a Republican-dominated Congress, with the compliance of fearful Democrats.

Republican philosophy has long leaned to the famous “starve the beast” point of view. This philosophy believes that government is evil, except for a very few governmental functions like defense, and that to keep it from doing anything much you must reduce the resources available to it. Paradoxically', those who run the federal government don't actually believe in government. This accounts for much: the staffing of federal agencies with people whose resume includes a history of agitating for the dismantling of the agencies they are hired to run; and especially the use of the three best techniques for preventing the federal government from doing anything to help its citizens: cutting taxes, spending money ineffectively, and starting a war.

Cutting taxes is not always bad. If the government is running a surplus, some reduction in taxes is reasonable if it is part of an overall plan that takes into consideration the real needs of the government and people, and factors in the fact that a reduction in debt frees funds in the future as debt maintenance costs are reduced. Previous tax cuts, however, have generally not resulted in a benefit to the public, balanced as they were by parallel spending cuts that reduced aid to the states. What actually happened under those circumstances was tax-shifting, not tax reduction, with state and local taxes rising to replace the lost federal aid.. Unfortunately, state and local taxes tend to be regressive, impacting the poor and especially the middle class far harder than the rich. In many states, property taxes have risen to disastrous levels, and sales taxes have risen as well. The Bush tax cuts were particularly poorly structured, focused on those who needed them least , with amounts set without regard to any future planning.

Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war, both notable for giant, no-compete contracts awarded to Halliburton and other politically connected companies. Most of these contracts went over budget and produced few, if any of the supposed results. Combining money-wasting (unsuccessful government operations) with lining the pockets of the administration and its friends, it is therefore a favored technique.

Finally, starting a war provides the ultimate in prevention of governmental success. The costs are astronomical, the benefits are non-existent, and it is the one governmental function of which conservatives approve. 9/11 was a quandry for the Bush administration: the public wanted something effective done, but Afghanistan wasn't the war they had wanted, and the timing was bad. As a result, the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban was done offhandedly and on the cheap. The real spending was saved for the war they had really wanted, in Iraq, where vast sums have been consumed in making our country less secure and the friends of the vice president much richer.

So is all this the result of a conspiracy to cripple the government and loot its coffers? Nah! Actually, they're not that smart. Opportunities arose to follow their philosophy (and their greed), and they took full advantage of it, but one would hope that if this was all a vast plot they would have been better at it. Everything they have done has been a public failure, the unintended consequence of which will be to bury their philosophy for a generation. Their overreaching has begun to have an adverse impact on the rich as well as the poor, and one of their basic tenets, a sound dollar, has been totally trashed. The social spending that they so abominate has not been reduced by much, and future social spending, on infrastructure, health care, education, research and job creation, will take place as needed and with the support of the public, paid for by repeal of the tax cuts and cessation of the Iraq war. The era of regulatory rollback has likewise been shown to be a failure, and has had severe negative impact on sales and profits, confidence in the markets and banking system, and the careers of jailed executives.

It’s not a conspiracy, it's stupidity and greed.

New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com