Any given day of the news, you can find some story of [fill in the blank] Republican politician saying America “can’t afford” to pay for Medicaid, or “Social Security is going broke,” or some new version of a timeless theme for the Republican Party: that America’s miserly social safety net is unsustainable and antiquated and putting table scraps in the mouths of the 90% of the country that isn’t rich is just too high a cost for the government to keep going.
Some recent versions of that are that Ron DeSantis recently kicked 1.7 million people off of Medicaid because he refused to keep properly funding the program, and Nikki Haley’s doomed Presidential campaign seems specifically geared around “sunsetting” social security, a misleadingly bloodless term that really means millennials and Gen-Z will apparently starve in the streets after retirement since we’re the generations least likely to have a pension of any kind.
Kevin McCarthy even picked a ludicrous debt ceiling fight over the IRS budget, pretending the best place to find government savings was in the budget of the very agency that brings in $8 of revenue for every dollar it spends. Needless to say, this was really about McCarthy’s desire to protect rich crooks/campaign donors from paying taxes. After all, the IRS under Trump basically admitted it did not have the resources to properly audit the truly wealthy and enforce the tax code for deca-millionaires and above.
All of this has led me to ask a question that has weighed on my mind for quite a long time, and been the backdrop for so many Alabama Liberal articles over the years. And that question is: why has the United States acted like it was one quarter away from bankruptcy for the last century when they have consistently had the world’s largest economy?
When every other major country on Earth was hurting and rebuilding from WWII, the U.S. refused to institute universal healthcare (every other country did), paid vacation time, a living minimum wage, universal preschool/pre-k, maternity leave, affordable housing, etc. and has generally acted like the next check could bounce.
I’ve never seen it behave as though the world currency has been the dollar for 80 years. Even this year—while Europe is experiencing sky-high inflation, Russia’s in shambles, Brazil is unstable, and China’s economic “miracle” looks more like a lie than ever—there’s STILL a fight over whether to actually clear a check (the debt ceiling).
Why didn’t the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Gen-X prioritize stability (which would be maintaining a thriving middle class and high standard of living) over unstable growth as though the repo man was chasing them, and the next check could bounce at any second if the stock market isn’t goosed by squeezed wages, layoffs, and tax cuts?
Part of it may have to do with the alarming decrease in private pensions, making people more reliant than ever on maintaining stock market “growth” (which often prioritizes the wrong things, like the aforementioned stagnant wages, layoffs, and tax cuts). But a larger part of it may be that the Republican Party needs most of the country to stay poor.
This is perhaps why almost every program ever designed to help poor people, working class people, or even middle class people has come from the Democratic Party: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Food Stamps, Pell grants, public housing, unemployment insurance, FDR’s the New Deal, LBJ’s the Great Society, and various public works (FDR literally put people to work during the Great Depression), entire agencies, and well over a 100 programs.
Almost all of the historical opposition to these programs has come from Republicans–a habit they have kept up into the Biden administration when every congressional Republican voted “no” on the third stimulus and Build Back Better–and they often campaign on dismantling it in some way. What do they offer in their place? Tax cuts for people that don’t need it (a repeal of the inheritance tax, lowering of the individual tax rate, lowering of the corporate tax rate, a social security income cap that has not been raised in 40 years) and deregulation to help the already huge get even bigger–playing a big role in the near-monopolies we see dominating most industries, driving the actual price gouging/inflation we’re “enjoying” today.
The general pattern has been that when they’re out of office, it’s important to screw things up as badly as possible so they can be welcomed back into power. For decades, they’ll do anything to get more political power except win the most votes with an actual popular agenda: California recalls, Clinton impeachment, BS investigations into Bill/Hillary/Obama/Biden, and blocking every America-helping bill possible. But when they’re in office, they do nothing, because the current status quo benefits their biggest donors (no forward progress against Big Oil, most expensive healthcare system in the world, substandard IRS budget so their biggest billionaires don’t actually pay taxes). Since the status quo benefits those who already huge from being disrupted or challenged by upstarts, it’s not actually important for them to do anything when they’re in office.
Put more plainly: they don’t want most people to have benefits and a living wage. All that “upward mobility” this and “path to prosperity” that stuff is phony, because they need the “middle class” (which has mostly become the stressed-out working poor) to do any job for any wage. Actual, shared economic prosperity doesn’t benefit their disposable attitude towards labor.
Under Biden, unemployment has become low and wages are higher—and they have just about lost their minds. The top oligarchs keep making threats like “Do this or find another job,” and they are flabbergasted that people have enough options to take them up on the “find another job” part.
They need America’s workforce desperate, insecure, and feeling like they’re lucky to have a job, ANY job even if their benefits are gone, their hours are longer, their pension is non-existent, and their wages have been virtually flat for a decade.