Governor Scott Walker and a gaggle of Republican governors assault the right of workers to bargain collectively in states across the country. Teachers get laid off as school budgets are cut across the country. Colleges hike tuitions and shut down course offerings. Public workers face furloughs, layoff, cuts in health care and pension benefits. Congress is tied in knots about how much and what to cut. And Republican and bipartisan pressure to go after Social Security and Medicare is escalating.
We should be very clear about what unites these stories, for these struggles will say much about what kind of America emerges from the rubble of the Great Recession.
Who gets stuck with the bill for the Great Recession?
From the tea party Republican caucus to the Obama White House, leaders of both parties have moved from worrying about the recovery to worrying about how to pay for the costs of the Great Recession. With 25 million Americans in need of full time work, this is bipartisan folly. With Japan melting down, the Middle East erupting, energy and food prices soaring, housing prices and starts sinking, states and localities enacting brutal budget cuts, it is callously irresponsible, risking a double dip recession that will explode public deficits.
But that's where we are -- focused on who pays for the mess. Wall Street excess and conservative deregulation (by law and lassitude) blew up the economy, causing the Great Recession. The bankers were bailed out. Working families took the hit from the downturn -- in lost jobs, lost savings, weakened pensions, declining home values, pay and benefit cuts.
The recession blew a large hole in public finances at every level. Tax revenues plummeted. Expenses -- from unemployment insurance to food stamps to public health -- rose. Public pension funds suffered investment losses. States and localities face severe deficits with a mandate to balance their budgets. At the federal level, the recession doubled the national debt, and drove deficits up to 10% of GDP (much of this the result of plummeting tax receipts).
Now the question is who pays for the damage?
The Republican position is clear and consistent at every level of government. They want to send the bill to teachers, cops, seniors, kids, the poor and the vulnerable. From Governor Walker in Wisconsin to Governor Kasich in Ohio and across the country, Republican Governors and conservative legislators are pushing for deep cuts in education, jobs programs, and public health programs (particularly Medicaid). They are slashing spending while seeking in many cases to cut taxes for corporations and the affluent.
That's true at the federal level as well. Republicans went to the mat to extend tax breaks for millionaires in December, and now are threatening to close down government to slash spending on education, jobs programs, energy and the environment, and public health for the remaining months of the FY 2011 budget. And for next year's budget, they are girding themselves to take on the core insurance programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- that provide the most vulnerable Americans -- seniors, the widowed, the disabled -- with some modicum of security.
We aren't buying what they are peddling
This agenda is immensely unpopular. Americans have rather clear and sensible ideas about how to cut the deficit. They want Social Security and Medicare protected. They oppose cuts in education. They don't like tax hikes on families that are already suffering pay cuts. With the growing and extreme concentration of income and wealth, voters support tax hikes for the richest Americans, imposing a surcharge on incomes above a million dollars. With Wall Street's casino wrecking ruin, they support taxes on bank profits, and a financial speculation or transaction tax to slow computer driven speculation. With the Pentagon spending about as much as the rest of the world combined spends on their militaries, they'd start with cuts in the defense budget, as well as subsidies for Big Oil and other corporate interests.
The more people become aware of the Republican agenda, the less they like it. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker hoped he could cram his legislation through a legislature under Republican control before people knew what hit them. But when workers mobilized, and Democratic Senators left the state, the voters got a chance to look at the Governor's program -- and his popularity plummeted. The same would surely be true of the public's reaction to the cuts demanded by the House Republicans in Washington, were we ever to have a pitched battle over them.
Dismember the Opposition
That reality requires the second front in the conservative offensive: a frontal assault to weaken the ability of organized people to counter the power of organized money.
Doing the bidding of corporations, banks and the wealthy insures that conservatives will have well stocked campaign coffers and deep independent expenditure money pots that can fund air and ground wars in support of their actions. Citizens United, the ruling written by the conservative gang of 5 on the Supreme Court, opened the floodgates to corporate money. Its effect -- like that of Reagan firing the Patco workers -- was as much symbolic as substantive, making it clear to corporate CEOS that this was the moment to go all in.
But even the most sophisticated Orwellian ad and Astroturf campaigns have a hard time overcoming the opposition of organized people. So conservatives have set out systematically to weaken or destroy the opposition.
That's why core worker rights are under assault in states across the country. This isn't about balancing the budget; it is about weakening the ability of workers to resist. Unions are the most potent opponent of the conservative agenda. With private sector unions weakened by globalization and the all out corporate assault on them over the last three decades, public employee unions -- teachers, cops, fire fighters, nurses -- are the leading edge of the opposition, and the leading target of the new attack.
But it isn't just unions. In states across the country, efforts are underway to strip students of their right to vote on their campuses, hoping to suppress the votes of the young. Various forms of requiring voter ID at the polling booth are being revived, seeking to depress the votes of seniors, minorities and the poor. Acorn, the most effective minority voter registration operation, is hit by a dishonest sting operation, ending with federal spending cut off. Planned Parenthood, a respected women's organization with chapters across all 50 states, is another target, with an attack on its funding now underway. Tort reform is aimed at trial lawyers, a leading source of liberal funds, curbing both their ability to bring actions and to collect damages.
The Big Kahuna
The stakes in this debate go far beyond getting public budgets in order. At stake is what kind of a society and economy we will build coming out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Recression.
Will we set in place the priorities and programs that can rebuild a broad middle class -- or will we return to the pre-recession economy with Gilded Age inequality increasing, and the middle class an endangered species?
Central to this is whether the democracy can rescue government from the clutches of predatory corporate interests and turn it back once more to an instrument of the common good. Will we bring our budget into balance by putting people back to work, and enacting progressive tax reform that sends the bill to those who helped create the mess, or balance it by cutting spending on education and other areas vital to providing opportunity to all? Will we take on the entrenched corporate interests that feed off government subsidy and privilege -- or go back to business as usual?
These questions are posed each day in Congress. Cut funding for schools or cut subsidies to big oil? Cut health care for seniors and the disabled or cut subsidies to the drug and insurance companies that drive up health care costs. Invest in rebuilding America, or continue to squander resources policing the world? Cut Social Security benefits that workers have paid for or require the wealthiest Americans to pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries?
Here again, unions are central to the story. After World War II, unions represented about 35% of the private workforce. As productivity and profits rose and the country got richer, unions helped insure that workers -- union and non-union -- got a fair share of the benefits. We all grew together and created the great triumph of America -- an American Dream that was within reach of a broad middle class.
But after 1980, with globalization, the corporate offensive on unions, the conservative era in our politics, unions declined dramatically to less than 7% of the private workforce. Productivity and profits continued to rise. Contrary to conservatives, America isn't broke. It generates more income now than it did a decade ago, and will generate more income in the next decades than it does now. America isn't broke but its working families are struggling. That's because they no longer share in the increased profits and productivity they help to create. The richest 1% captures fully 23% of the income in the society, and has more wealth than 90% of Americans, while most households lost ground when the economy was growing in the last decade. If the right succeeds in destroying unions, it will surely accelerate the destruction of the middle class and our descent into ever greater inequality.
Conservatives are very clear about this. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan says the choice is between "European Social Democracy" and traditional American free enterprise. But he and his colleagues define social democracy to include the core institutions of middle class security and opportunity -- Social security, Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, living wages, affordable health care, public schools, affordable colleges, etc. They are intent on using this crisis to rollback as much of this as they can. They know it won't be popular so they are intent on crippling unions and other institutions that they know will stand in the way.
The fight in Wisconsin and elsewhere for the right to bargain collectively isn't divorced from the budget fights in Washington and the states. These are all part of a struggle for what kind of America we will build. No one can be a bystander in this debate.
Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage
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FDR negotiated a way out of the Great Depression and almost to the end of World WarII. He stood up for the working man.
What's Obama going to do for the working man now to preserve the Union so it's still recognizable as The United States of America a generation from now?
Obama now has a "sputnik moment" where he can stand up to the all out assault by the GOP against women, the middle class, the unions, you know, the people.
Here is his opportunity to shime like Lincoln, Teddy and FDR. Write an Emanicipation Declaration for women, the middle class, the unions, for the people who sacrifice more daily than the millionaires and billionaires in a lifetime.
Let's see if that balances the budget, if not extend it for another two years.
Do we pay for the companies? No, after all the pollution and tax cuts and windfall profits, they should be able to make the same sacrifices as the rest of America, it would be patriotic.
I'll say this again, this isn't about balancing the budget, that's a distraction, not that it shouldn't be eventually, but not during this recession, it isn't the road to recovery. That would be by reinvesting in America, not the banks or wall street, but its people.
The struggle is about power, once attained by the GOP you can kiss America goodbye and your boss's derriere while you're at if you still have a job.
"Government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from this Earth" not Government by corporations for bankers and for the elite! We will not return to feudalism! As they used to say on the Sopranos "just forget about it"
If a government can't help it's people educate all their children to help them reach their full potential and help take care of all their elderly so they do not suffer and their pain is eased it does not deserve to exist!
Politicians need to realize that not matter what party or constituency they feel beholding to they were hired to represent all the people and they better act accordingly.
And what is so gauling is that the Republicans continue to push for lower taxes ON THE RICH and for more DEREGULATIONS on wall street.
At the SAME TIME they are working to break the unions, teachers, public workers... you get the idea. (middle class)
Who pays the bill? Not the Republicans.
The Bush tax cuts were extended, mostly because there was an actual moment of bi-partisonship where entending tax rates for the rich actually allowed something more for the middle class. In other words the Republicans said pass ALL the tax rates or we will block middle class legislation. (in honesty Democrats used that same tactic when they were in power)
But, all I heard before the November elections was JOBS, JOBS, JOBS and that IS NOT what the Republican leadership is doing. To the contrary... if the job rates do not get better that is not good for President Obama in 2012....which makes me wonder if the Republicans really want to help the middle class with jobs.
Seems like creating jobs is not a very high priority with them...
But, you forgot to mention they pay 38.02% of the federal income taxes! And during 2007, the top 1 percent actually paid more in federal income tax than the bottom 95 percent. The rich are paying for the overwhelming majority of your socialist programs, yet you choose to vilify them at every turn. What will you do when you run out of their money?
In fact, Middle-class households that earned between $34,300 and $141,900 paid 50.5 percent of all federal tax revenues in 2007 (the most recent year analyzed), according to the CBO study released Thursday, and households that earned between $34,300 and $352,900 paid 66.7 percent of all federal taxes.
So I don't know what report you read, but you need to clean your glasses, they must be full of something.
you liberals assume that somehow the rich consume more governmetn services than anyone else.....in fact teh rich tend to use far less services than anyone else. They don't use utilities such as roads any more than anyone else for example. so why should they have to pay so much more in taxes? The liberal view on this makes no sense from that perspective.
You simply want more of what some else earned....it is pure wealth redistribution that you really want. Our government was not set up to carry this out nor is it desirablein my opinion because it has a negative impact on risk taking and business investment for those who are net payers and it tends to foster dependence on government for those who are net receivers of benefits.
Your assumption seems to be that everything that government does now is efficient, effective and fair......I don't think most of what the governemnt does meets any of those criteria. So cutting government and thus everyones "fair share" is really asking the quesiton....what should that "share" be?
You have concluded that rich people are greedy....what about public employees and thier unions? They have won contracts that over hte years that allow retirement at as low as age 55 with a pension that equals 90% of their working pay in some cases.
By your definition everyone posseses a certain amount greed instinct.
In 2007, the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income tax than the bottom 95% of income earners COMBINED! And this despite the widespread belief that the rich are escaping taxation through all manner of loopholes and deductions. The top 1% now pay more than double the share of taxes they paid before Reagan became President and more than BEFORE the Bush tax cuts.
And why do we demand that those who contribute the most to society (based on how many of our dollars we willingly surrender to them) should pay such a large share of the government's expenses? It's not because they get more services (food stamps, Medicaid, EITC, etc.). They actually get a much smaller return from their contributions to Social Security and Medicare than the rest of us. No, the only explanation for why we soak the rich is the reason that infamous bank robber Willie Sutton gave for why he robbed banks: "Cuz that's where the money is!"
It's popular. It's practical. It's easy. But don't call it fair.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2009/average_after-tax_income.xls
Borosage is right. America is not broke. It is being gamed and the end-game is in sight.
Adn just for your information.....the US is still teh largest manufacturer in the world.