A deficit of morality
by David Atkins
The next time your conservative friend or relative mentions the deficit, here’s a great coherent response:
Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But its biggest driver is Big Money’s corruption of Washington. One of the federal budget’s largest and fastest-growing programs is Medicare, whose costs would be far lower if drug companies reduced their prices. It hasn’t happened because Big Pharma won’t allow it. Medicare’s administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average of private insurers. So it would be logical to tame rising healthcare costs by allowing any family to opt in. That was the idea behind the “public option.” But health insurers stopped it in its tracks.
The other big budget expense is defense. The US spends more on its military than China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan and Germany combined. The “basic” military budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships and tanks—not including the costs of actually fighting wars) keeps growing. With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop—but the base budget is scheduled to rise. It’s already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. One big reason is that it’s almost impossible to terminate large military contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their facilities in politically important districts. Lockheed, Raytheon and others have made national defense America’s biggest jobs program.
“Big government” isn’t the problem. The problem is the Big Money that’s taking over government. Government is doing fewer of the things most of us want it to do—providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving infrastructure, maintaining safety nets and protecting the public from dangers—and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street and wealthy plutocrats want it to do.
Some conservatives argue that we wouldn’t have to worry about this if we had a smaller government to begin with, because big government attracts Big Money. On ABC’s This Week a few months ago, Congressman Paul Ryan told me that “if the power and money are going to be here in Washington…that’s where the powerful are going to go to influence it.” Ryan has it upside down. A smaller government that’s still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors and rich individuals. It just wouldn’t do anything else.
Or if charts are more your thing, there’s always this classic:
Of course, it won’t do much good. Digby highlighted recent discussion of the conservative moral ethic, but I would argue that only two things really drive conservative morality: is us versus them, and punishment and reward. Worship of free markets, psychological dependence on dualistic religious schemes of heaven and hell, and even their apparent mass lack of empathy is really all about punishment and reward. If you didn’t get rich enough with the right job, you deserve to be poor and die of untreated medical conditions. If you didn’t keep your legs crossed, you deserve to be forced into childbirth. If you did anything to bring yourself under government suspicion, you deserve to be subject to police brutality and torture. The rest of the racial and religious aggression and resentment is just a function of tribal us versus them mentality. Sanctity, loyalty and authority aren’t core values of the conservative mind, but simply functions of the principles of punishment and reward, and us versus them.
Chait has it right:
Here [Romney] is in keeping with what has become almost a blood oath among Republicans. The conservative movement’s fanatical determination to achieve this goal — through the courts, through the election, through sabotage of its implementation by denying funds and refusing to confirm administrators — reveals an even higher level of commitment to the principle of denying health insurance to the undeserving. It is one thing to simply ignore the problem of the uninsured, by failing to act on it when you have power. But to actively crusade to throw vulnerable people off their newly-won health insurance is a higher sin, a sin of commission rather than omission.
In every other advanced country, the provision of universal access to medical care is a public responsibility. In every other advanced country, this principle has been accepted by the mainstream conservative party. Only in the United States does the conservative party uphold the operating principle that regular access to doctors and medicine should be denied to large chunks of the population. This sort of barbarism is unique to the American right.
Barbarism is exactly what it is. Blind tribalism and reliance on indiscriminate cosmic punishments are barbaric. They always have been, and always will be.
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