This piece was particularly timely, as everyone, especially libertarians who would rather not see their government spend money on anything, especially the well being of its citizens, if it means they can have more money to stuff their mattresses with, debate the costs of some of the critical measures that the President and Congress have in front of them right now.

Everything from action on climate change to health care have a price tag associated with them, and industry groups usually trot out the same scare tactics to try and frighten politicians into backing away from their initiatives: “It’ll cost money, and probably jobs!”

Protip for the politically uninitiated: you can usually tell who’s on the wrong side of the argument if they say that doing nothing, or worse, going backwards, is the best option because the alternative will cost money, cost jobs, or make things harder for “Joe Six-Pack.” The same held true for the bailouts, the same holds true for environmental legislation and for health care. But why do they ring so clearly?

Simple: because depending on which side of the political spectrum the economists you drag out line up with, they can come up with worst-case scenarios where our grandchildren are faced with massive deficits, higher taxes, and a huge debt to some amorphous foreign interest (the Chinese are this decade’s favorite target – in the 80s it was the Japanese) they’ll have to essentially go into indentured servitude to pay back. You can already hear it in the voices of some economists on the radio: they happily cash their checks from The Enterprise Institute and The Cato Institute and claim that someday down the road our children’s children’s children will pay massive taxes in order to keep these social programs – you know, like access to the care and services that our neighbors in Europe already have – alive.

The funny thing is that while every country has its social and political problems, health care is one of the more managable for some of our European counterparts. As with education and other social services, those people have an understanding that the common good is worth a little more out of the individual paycheck – especially if it means that they money they give to the government to pay for services will result in not getting ever escalating bills from the so-called free market. Add to this that the doom-and-gloomers almost never do a benefit analysis to compare the recovered costs on the back end to escalated costs on the front end – as in, how do I save money over time – and there you have it.

It’s a scare tactic, pure and simple, and it always has been. Ever since progressive politicians were labeled “tax and spenders,” and ever since taxation got a bad name, it’s been this way. The conservative right and the free-marketeers all over the political map have used the threats of debt to scare people into doing nothing to improve their personal situations, and politicians to do nothing to improve our local, state, and national situations. It has to stop. Robert Borosage, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, says:

We’ve got a new red scare. Forget Glenn Beck; the fear isn’t that America is going red, it’s that it is in the red. Conservatives in both parties are raising alarms about deficits and government spending. Well, get over it. If we are going to generate growth and shared prosperity out of the mess we are in, expanded public investment must be a centerpiece of the new economy.

In today’s Washington, this verges on heresy. The chattering classes are raising a clamor about Obama’s deficits. The growing fixation, fanned by conservatives in both parties, may well cripple any short-term recovery. Worse, the wrong-headed debate could well undermine the reforms vital to the new economy we need to build out of the ruins of the old.

Both parties still pay tribute to false idols that should have been discarded in the recent economic collapse. Republicans rail against everything Obama, chanting, “Where are the jobs?” while calling for rolling back the stimulus, abandoning health care reform, cutting spending and, no surprise, more tax cuts. They seem to have learned nothing from the crisis. Sure, they claim that they have put aside their fiscally wastrel ways, blaming it all on Bush, and have become born-again fiscal conservatives.

But this leaves them in the bizarre posture of arguing that “deficits don’t matter” when the economy is growing, but are unacceptable when the economy is sinking. Step on the gas when the economy is already racing and on the brake when it is sputtering. The perpetually tanned leader of House Republicans, John Boehner, clearly believes that Americans have neither memory nor common sense. The continued high disregard that most Americans have for Republican legislators suggests otherwise.

But conservative Democrats of various ilk—the corporate New Dems, the old-boy Blue Dogs—echo the Republican fears, using the recession-driven deficits to revive their efforts to force cuts in “entitlements” (read: Social Security and Medicare). This is both bad policy and bad politics.

In reality, the world has changed.

That it has, Borosage, that it has. It’s time we threw away this old world-view that somehow we’re a nation without communities, and without responsibilities to each other.

[ The New Red-Ink Scare ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future