Budgets are moral documents, some lefties say. “Some” being even Vice President Mike Pence, although a raft of quotations pages cite no source for his saying so. Nevertheless, ours have been seriously out of line with our espoused moral priorities pretty much forever.
When the Berlin Wall fell, among anti-nuclear and peace activists there was widespread talk of a “peace dividend.” Think of all the helpful things the United States could do with the money it would not be spending to defend against the Soviet Union, they said. Billions might be redirected to schools and health care, etc., to programs that would make life better for children and other living things.
That never happened, of course. The United States will spend hundreds of billions of deficit dollars on military hardware. But spending (deficit or not) on things that do not go BOOM face hyperbolic morality plays in Congress about moral hazard and the personal integrity of intended recipients. Congress must debate the true needs of lower classes God has seen unfit to bestow with riches. The poors must be incentivized to throw themselves against the wheel in redeeming, character-building labor. Fiscal conservatives must wring waste, fraud and abuse from entitlement programs to make room in our budgets for the waste, fraud, and abuse in military spending. They key difference being into whose pockets deficit dollars ultimately flow.
If nothing else, budgets are a reflection of priorities. They reveal our nation’s character. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus said. Jesus knew a thing or two about people’s priorities.
The drive to reopen state economies before the deadly coronavirus epidemic is under control lays bare where our priorities are. Still are.
“The chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge said in January 1925, praising commerce as a core motivator in people’s lives as the Roaring Twenties roared. He said that just before challenging the poet Oliver Goldsmith’s belief that wealth is corrupting:
Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins.
We know where that attitude led just over four years later.
A century on, we are reliving the end result of wealth-driven budget priorities. Thus, today we must return Americans’ shoulders to the wheel with all haste, even to the risk of their lives, lest in idleness they risk their immortal souls.
Abby Goodnough and Reed Abelson consider the Trump administration’s effort to collapse the Affordable Care Act. The patchwork system is being tested by the pandemic that has left millions of vulnerable Americans of lesser means at risk of catastrophic illness and financial ruin. Just before midnight Thursday, the Trump administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to overturn the law. The court already increased people’s vulnerability by allowing states to opt out of expanding Medicaid:
Four out of every five people who have lost employer-provided health insurance during the coronavirus pandemic are eligible for free coverage through expanded Medicaid programs or government-subsidized private insurance, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group. And many jobless 20-somethings have been able to join their parents’ plans. All three options were made possible by the law.
Yet others have fallen through the holes in the law’s safety net. Nearly three million low-income people are ineligible for assistance in the 14 states that have declined to expand Medicaid under the law, including Texas, Florida and others, mostly in the South, where coronavirus cases are now spiking. Many people who have qualified for government subsidies to buy private plans still face unaffordable co-pays and deductibles.
We might have addressed that the way activists fantasized the U.S. might have spent that peace divided. We did not.
“The pandemic has exposed some of the glaring weaknesses in the A.C.A.,” said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who served as a health policy adviser to the Clinton administration. “When millions of workers lose their jobs, most of them also lose their health coverage, and the A.C.A. does not provide for any automatic backup or means of transferring coverage to a publicly subsidized alternative.”
“To be sure, we are better off with the A.C.A. than without it,” Mr. Starr added, “but we ought to be prepared to go beyond it and create a system that doesn’t leave so many Americans in the lurch.”
We might have, as Denmark did, covered 75 to 90 percent of all worker salaries during the coronavirus shutdown. Our budgets might have prioritized health and safety above the need to accumulate wealth. Instead, the president, fixated on his reelection as he reportedly is, demanded we get the human hamsters back on their wheels with all haste.
People have died. More people will die. Congress, the president, and states that succumbed to pressure to reopen their economies early have their priorities.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.