Cutting Remarks

I'm peeved at the whole $5.8 trillion in budget cuts proposal of Paul Ryan's making (or whoever actually came up with it, likely crafted in some reactionary think tanks). While the balls of actually invoking such draconian cuts is laudable, the targets they're choosing are irritating, to put it politely. Privatizing Medicare and Medicaid while barely touching the defense budget ($78 billion skimmed from it over a 10-year period? That's ludicrous) while at the same time throwing more tax cut bones to the already-gorged rich and hyperrich? WTF? Crotch-kick the poor, the young, and the elderly for the sake of the top 1%? The truth is that an honest budgetary discussion must take place nationally, but that's the key thing: it must be an honest discussion. The defense budget has to come down, because it's massive, and the Right views it as sacrosanct. So many of the worst excesses of their "Big Government" bugaboo are buried deep within the defense budget, but it's a powerful and well-entrenched lobby, and so they go after Medicare and Medicaid, instead, because that's just poor, old, sick, and weak folks.

They say you can judge the health of a society not by how it treats its strongest citizens, but how it treats its weakest. The Ryan budget proposal is very revealing as to what the priorities of the Right are in this.

The frustrating thing is that the Democrats will likely cobble together a wussified "alternative" to the Ryan budget proposal that'll also overlook the gorilla in the room that is the Pentagon. The simple truth of it is that our defense budget is a runaway thing, operating far and away beyond anything that can possibly be construed as "national defense." Unless we're simply waving the white flag and are accommodating ourselves to a state of permanent military mobilization, keen to spend our way right over the cliff for War, Inc. We are not immune from history -- empires invariably end up doing exactly this: the homeland becomes destitute because the money is flowing outward, to the military.

There's a reason why coups occur in regimes where civil society boils away before the concentration of wealth and power -- it's because the only institution left standing by that time is the military. It becomes the only thing left, so why not take power? That's why standing armies are invariably inimical to liberty.

This reality is completely lost on the GOP, and the Democrats lack the stones to make a stand on this issue. A true budgetary compromise should take about half of our military budget (then we'll only be outspending the rest of the world combined by 8 times, instead of 16 times) and half of the entitlements spending, and reform the tax code to some kind of progressive standard.

The alternative is just a highly militarized, domestically impoverished, elite-controlled plutocracy, staggering around, with an increasingly unhealthy, ignorant, and destitute populace. Not a situation terribly conducive to democratic functioning, or economic well-being. Turning the US into a banana republic is simply not a step forward, and the Ryan proposal paves that way.

Whether the Democrats have the balls to actually offer an alternative to it is another matter. I'm not holding my breath.

Further reading...

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/86301/ryan-cbo-severe-medicare-medicaid-cuts

And a bit more that gets to the heart of what I'm grousing about, which is the mendaciously regressive tax cuts that are, at heart, the only thing near and dear to the GOP's hard heart...

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/86270/the-achilles-heel-the-path-prosperity

Sunshine

Beautiful day today, like proper Spring, instead of bogus Spring -- cool temperatures, lots of sunlight. Pretty.

6100 words.