It's YOUR Fault, Dufus

The government we deserve

By Bradley R. Gitz



LITTLE ROCK — As this column is being written, it is unclear whether we are headed over the “fiscal cliff” or whether some last-ditch agreement will prevent it. Either way, our fiscal mess remains.

Like every other first-world country, America has a structural problem brought on by demographic change; more precisely, declining fertility rates on the front end and greater life expectancy on the back.

This long-foreseen demographic challenge has become a crisis (replete with “cliff” imagery) only because of our insufficient political response to it.

For their part, it has become obvious from the start of the fiscal-cliff negotiations that the Democrats don’t want anything resembling a balanced solution consisting of tax increases and spending cuts because they aren’t interested in the spending-cut part.To the contrary, they want to spend still more, lots more, and President Barack Obama has even demanded what amounts to a limitless credit card with which to do so (executive authority to unilaterally lift the nation’s debt limit).

America might be broke, but one of its two major political parties still can’t stop spending. And it can’t stop spending because spending is what its political philosophy boils down to; it has no other rationale for existence, even when all the money is gone.

When Obama demands tax cuts now and promises spending cuts later, it is only the latest version of great real estate deals in Florida swampland. Everyone with a brain bigger than that of a hamster knows the cuts will never happen. We’ve been there and not done that way too many times before.

That one of our two major parties has no grasp of economic reality wouldn’t matter so much if the other one (the Republican) had the courage to play the adult in the room, but it won’t.

Running out of money isn’t a problem for Democrats because they’ve never figured out and don’t much care about that whole spending/revenue thing in the first place. The Democratic solution to every political problem is to throw more of other people’s money at it and hope some of it sticks.

Unfortunately, the Republican problem is that they are incapable of communicating to the American people why this is stupid, and stupid in a way that any 8-year old with a weekly allowance to stretch already knows.

If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus, the other party gets stuck being Scrooge. Alas, and as Republicans are painfully aware, everybody likes (and often votes for) Santa; nobody likes (and everybody almost always votes against) Scrooge, particularly when Scrooge tries to point out that Santa doesn’t (and can’t) really exist.

During the fall campaign, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had the perfect opportunity to tell the truth to the American people about the looming fiscal disaster; they demurred, to the point of ignoring even Ryan’s own budget road map designed to prevent it. Romney and Ryan didn’t step up to the plate with specific solutions because they were afraid to be the bearers of bad news-that just about every federal program is going to have to be cut, most of them massively, if we have any chance of avoiding fiscal collapse.

They shrank from the task out of fear of losing, and then lost anyway.

Ironically, what this all means is that both parties have a stunningly low regard for the intelligence of the electorate they try to appeal to.

The Democrats sense that the voters are corrupt and seek, through more blandishments and goodies, to make them more corrupt still; that tomorrow doesn’t matter as long as we can get as much as we can today. They measure success by the degree of public dependence upon government; the more people who need that government check to make it through the week, the better Democratic electoral prospects-news reports point out, for instance, that more than a third of the people in Detroit are on food stamps and nearly half have dropped out of the labor force altogether, but the (strong) hunch is that few of those folks voted for Romney on November 6th.

If the Democratic electoral strategy ultimately represents a cynical bet on the stupidity and shortsightedness of the electorate, Republicans have done little to suggest they disagree.

The GOP doesn’t dare talk about cutting Medicare, raising the Social Security retirement age, or doing away with worthless federal programs and departments (Education! Energy!) because it assumes the message that “we can’t afford it” (even if we can’t) is a sure loser at the ballot box in a country where voters are ignorant and selfish.

Thus, the Democratic electoral strategy is to assume that the people lack what the Founders called “virtue.” The Republicans fear they might be right on that score and shrink from the task of educating them.

In a democracy, we get the kind of government and the kinds of public policies we deserve; a truism which means that President Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner aren’t to blame for the mess we are in.

We are.