There is a dangerously painful story line that is being propagated about a presidential race between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The line is that this will be a contest over competing visions for the country. In this story the alternative visions are outlined in the competing budgets put forward by President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which Governor Romney has embraced.
The story of competing visions is a cute fairy tale for people who don't know anything about Washington and American politics. For adults who have not newly arrived from some foreign country, this line is just silly.
President Obama and Governor Romney are politicians, not philosophers. They have not made it to the top of the political ladder because of their grand visions of the future. They got their positions by appealing to powerful political actors who were able to give them the money and/or votes needed to get ahead.
The absurdity of the competing visions story is apparent to anyone who has looked at the Ryan budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of Representative Ryan's budget, which was prepared under his direction, the budget would shrink all non-Social Security and non-health care spending to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050.
To put this in perspective, the United States currently spends roughly 4 percent of GDP on the military, not including spending on the war in Afghanistan. Since the start of the Cold War it has never spent less than 3.0 percent of GDP on the military. Ryan does not want sharp cuts in defense; in fact he has already criticized the modest cuts President Obama's 2013 budget proposal.
Let's assume that Representative Ryan wants to keep defense spending somewhere between its 3.0 percent of GDP low and the 4.0 percent current level. That leaves somewhere between zero and 0.75 percent of GDP for everything else the federal government does other than Social Security, health care and defense.
This spending must cover all of the federal government's spending on road and bridges, airports and every other form of transportation. It covers its spending on aid to education, from running day care and Head Start to Pell grants and other college aid. It covers research and development including funding for the National Institutes of Health. It includes the money needed to run the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the federal prison system. It includes the money to pay for the border patrol and immigration enforcement, the patent office, and Food and Drug Administration.
In short, if the Romney-Ryan budget is taken seriously, then the vision essentially involves shutting down the federal government. All the federal government will do is literally run a military and pay out money for health care and Social Security. We will have no federal courts, federal law, patents, copyrights or borders since their budget has no money to pay for the institutions needed for enforcement.
So what exactly is the Romney-Ryan vision in this scenario? How do they envision that Pfizer and Merck will make money when there is no patent agency to register their drug patents or courts to enforce them? The same applies to copyrights for Microsoft, Time-Warner and all the other firms that depend on copyright protection.
What will be U.S. immigration policy when we have no one to enforce borders or even issue passports? Is the Romney-Ryan vision an open country with no borders? How about the airwaves, what will broadcast and telecommunications giants like Comcast and Verizon do to secure their access to the airwaves when there is no Federal Communications Commission to parcel out bandwidth?
Will there no longer be an interstate highway system, since there will be no federal funds to maintain it? Will airports and air traffic control be left to states, since there is no money for the Federal Aviation Commission?
These are the questions that reporters should be asking about the Romney-Ryan vision. The arithmetic in the Romney-Ryan budget says that they want to shut down the federal government outside of Social Security, health care and defense. Maybe the reporters who are singing about competing visions can try to tell the rest of us what the Romney-Ryan vision means, since the information on the table does not give a clue as to what the Romney-Ryan world looks like.
Since the Romney-Ryan vision makes zero sense (challenge to pundits: try to show otherwise), let's try an alternative story. Suppose that there is no Romney-Ryan vision. Suppose that Romney and Ryan are politicians trying to appeal to rich people by promising them big tax cuts. After all, big tax cuts for the rich is the item is that is most clearly defined in the Romney-Ryan budget.
So why don't "neutral" reporters just tell us what the budget does -- it gives tax cuts to the rich and guts programs that benefit the middle class and the poor. The stuff about "vision" is just nonsense to tell children and Washington pundits.
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You can nibble at the edges by term limits for members of Congress and public financing of elections and taking corporate money out of the loop, but for every legitimate hurdle you place trying to legitimize integrity to the system, is all the more innovations & scam which is used to get around it.
Until their is a fundamental change in the way people think the world ought to be based on fairness, equity, cooperation and integrity, you will always get more of the same.
It's not the person which matters, it's the whole system of how this nation is governed which is corrupt to the core and has in my opinion as Professor Chomsky has iterated, a "Failed Sate". And by the criteria which most academics in political & social science have come to regard what defines a "Failed Sate" we far surpass the criteria.
And we need the coming together of solidarity of progressive social movements to clean house.
It will happen anyway as we further operate on a BAU(Business As Usual )paradigm that has no off switch to economic growth that is obviously unsustainable from our planets natural resources.
But why do you fail to address the other fairytale out there put forth by the President?
His budget has trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
Why don't you also come out in favor of telling the American people the truth about how high taxes will have to go - on everyone - not just the "rich" if we do nothing about spending.
To point out Ryan's plan is a bit of a fairytale does no good unless you point out the Obama plan is an equal and opposite fairytale.
That's what Ryan's budget wants to do.
Obama's budget is like saying, "Well, I hope I can find a job soon and get some income rolling in, but no way are my kids going hungry even if it does mean I stiff the credit card company in the end."
That's 50 billion out of 4 trillion?
Barely 1%.
Ryan gets kudos since he can use a spreadsheet and has the phraseology down pat. That his numbers mean crap - if anyone chooses to actually exercise the functionality of a properly formulated spreadsheet - is simply not important to the discussion.
It's all nicely ethereal and ideologically loyal and all that brain-dead, post-evidence society stuff.....until the masses find themselves back in the 19th century. I'm sure we'll all have Melissa Sue Anderson, nice skin and all, as our neighbor.
If someone removed the social issues that are on the table and asked me to pick a Pres, I'd probably shrug and decline to participate.
Both Romney and Obama are marionettes hanging from strings of solid gold, both of them think of regular people as those replaceable parts that make money for their corporate donors and (somewhat) legitimize the "Democratic" process by voting.
A lot of my friends say they "don't vote social issues", which is dumb. Social issues are economic issues are political issues, they're not easily separable once you begin to look at it.
So my vote this year goes for the branch of the Oligarchy that doesn't mind women controlling their own bodies, because a choice between "Regressing back to the 50's" and "Not doing that" isn't much of a choice at all.
If your not willing to keep the BAU (Business As Usual for the 1% oligarchs)paradigm on default in keeping the machine of wealth accumulation at the expense of exploitation (evidenced by 1/2 the planets population living on $2 a day or less) on behalf of the 1% you won't last long.
Which is why when you listen to all the campaign rhetoric, all you ever hear are issues that have absolutely no bearing on what is truly important to solving the challenges our nation faces. Instead what you get is similar to what you find on any typical cable channel designed to keep you focused on consumerism, competition by any means, and all the social stigma that supports the culture of empire.
Want to see their vision for the USA 2020. Book a flight to Columbia, Bolivia or Ecuador and take a good look around.
This year our budget is what $3.5 T or something of which $1.3 T is purely deficit spending. How much has deficit spending increased under President Obama? What is our debt service on our now $15.5 T debt of which nearly $6 T is owed to Social Security and Medicare? You realizie it took Obama just over 3 years to accumulate as much debt as it took GWB in 8 years fighting 2 wars?
Wouldn't it have been better to throw out the rest of the big ticket items of the US budget? How much is social security, medicare, medicaid, debt service? Remember back in 2010 when people like yourself were screaming that if we merely trimmed oh, just $100 B from the budget, people all over the country were going to start dying? Remember those lies?
Wouldn't it just be better to have the onions to just say publicly that you hate the military and don't want a national defense?
Deficit spending by the 'investor of last resort' is par for the course, as the Great Depression itself showed (along with WWII). Want to balance the budget? Move to single payer healthcare (which will save the country almost a trillion dollars a year), reduce defense spending to 60% its current value and raise taxes on the rich (end the Bush tax cuts + add more taxes and address loopholes, also raise corporate taxes). If this is politically unpalatable, do what Obama/Bernanke are doing: make up trillions of dollars and inflate your way out of debt (inflation is also handy to get investors holding onto cash to let some of it go).
It's not a conspiracy, but it is a common vision that conservatives have for the US.
my two pennys
Once the Federal government is anathema, Conservatives can advance their social agenda state by state, as they are already attempting with bills to outlaw contraception, obliterate voter's rights, kill unions, etc.
The vision for America at the heart of the RyanRomney budget is a bleak one for most Americans. But it will be great for big banks, corporations and the one percent.
Everyone knows both parties are completely corrupt, so they vote based on the one or two issues they agree on.
They sometimes vote for whomever has the best marketing :)