Tuesday, August 26, 2003
(9:26 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
New Krugman
Today's Krugman column is pretty good. I'll do a couple selected quotes:
Immediately after 9/11 there was a great national outpouring of sympathy for New York, and a natural inclination to provide generous help. President Bush quickly promised $20 billion, and everyone expected the federal government to assume the burden of additional security. Yet hard-line Republicans never wanted to help the stricken city. Indeed, according to an article by Michael Tomasky in New York magazine, Senators Phil Gramm and Don Nickles attempted to slash aid to New York within hours of Mr. Bush's promise.
[...]
Why this stinginess? A source told Mr. Tomasky that "Gramm just doesn't like spending money. And Nickles . . . he's just anti-New York." That sums it up: even after 9/11, hard-line conservatives opposed any spending, no matter how justified, that wasn't on weapons or farm subsidies, while some people from America's "red states" just hate big-city folk.
[...]
In the end, New York seems to have gotten its $20 billion — barely. As for the additional help everyone expected: don't get me started. There wasn't a penny of federal aid for "first responders" — like those firefighters and police officers who cheered Mr. Bush at ground zero — until a few months ago, and much of it went to sparsely populated states. The federal government spends much more protecting the average resident of Wyoming from terrorists than it spends protecting the average resident of New York City.
There's a line from Seinfeld where George mentions God striking him down. Jerry says that he didn't know George believed in God, and George replies, "I do for the bad stuff." I think that might be the same way for George (ha!) W. Bush's approach to "big government." As far as providing assistance for law enforcement and toxic chemical cleanup in a major target for terrorism that also happens to be one of our nation's most vibrant cultural and financial centers, Bush apparently doesn't believe the federal government has much responsibility. When it comes to expanding surveillance, restricting civil liberties, maintaining the farm subsidies that help to starve the Third World to death, and developing an unparalleled array of weapons of mass destruction, he's really into it.
The right wing has always had this backwards approach to government, usually backed up by an almost perverse misuse of such concepts as liberty and justice. Apparently government efforts to achieve justice for the poor, to grant health insurance to all Americans, to provide free public education, or whatever other actual good thing the government might do would encroach on our liberty by making us into a bunch of socialists. But whose liberty would it be encroaching on? Personally, I would love to have my "freedom" to worry about health coverage and to go into massive debt to finance my education taken away -- that's not the kind of freedom that enhances my life in any way. In the same way, apparently progressive tax schemes are "punitive" and "unjust," just because of the percentage of income they take from the very wealthy. But why on earth is a percentage rate the standard of justice? It is a really different thing for Bill Gates to pay 25% of his income in taxes than for the average person and especially the poor person. For the government to require that those who have benefitted vastly disproportionately from America's abundance and its stable economic and political structures give a proportionately larger amount of their income back to society as a whole seems perfectly just to me.
The problem is that conservatives seem to view things only on the level of individuals. When they see a very wealthy person, at least in their rhetoric they see someone who has "worked hard" to "earn" everything he has. They put on blinders the prevent them from seeing the ways in which they had to have certain social structures already in place. For instance, you can "work" as "hard" as you want in Uzbekistan, and you're almost certainly never going to become wealthy. The individualist approach leads to ingratitude among the very wealthy and among those conservative commentators who spend three hours a day advancing the cause of the wealthy. If those who were wealthy were encouraged to look at themselves as part of a larger social whole, then perhaps they might not view taxation as the government (a foreign agent in their mind, rather than their representative) confiscating their hard-earned wealth, but as a chance to contribute to the building of social structures that will expand opportunities for every citizen by making sure that wealth does not become overly concentrated in a few hands.
In America, though, we're so divided up as little individuals (or at best little nuclear families) that we can't really bind together for any project aside from war. That might be why the "war on poverty" didn't really work out -- American's aren't stupid. They realized it wasn't a real war, the kind with guns and stuff. For a society to bind together in order to bring about justice would be almost unprecedented, though -- almost, almost a miracle.
