You Get What You Pay For

by digby

My pal Ezra has a big fat cover piece this morning in the LA Times Opinion section about the effects of GOP privatization and malfeasance, called “Government by Bake Sale” that is excellent. (The headline is different online, for unknown reasons.)I knew it had gotten bad when I read stories about families being forced to buy equipment for troops in the field, but I had no idea that we had now created “private” prisons where you can “upgrade” your stay by paying for better accomodations:

What’s so wrong, in other words, with hollowing out the public sector and replacing it with a pay-as-you-go society? It is the natural endpoint, after all, of the privatization craze, of the gospel of tax cuts and of the smaller-government-is-better-government mentality that has been on the ascendancy in the U.S. for nearly 25 years.

The New York Times recently offered a particularly striking example: Apparently there are about a dozen jails throughout California that offer pay-to-stay “upgrades.” Inmates (or “clients,” as they’re known) who pay an extra $75 to $127 a day get a cell with a regular door, located at some distance from violent offenders, as well as the right, in some cases, to bring in an iPod, a cellphone or a laptop. The rich no longer need patronize the same jails as the rest of us. It makes you wonder whether Paris Hilton’s unexpected jail time is a sentence or a scouting mission for new hotel expansion opportunities.

Funny. I honestly didn’t know that we were now basing our prison system on the old English Newgate model where the swells could buy themselves better accomodations, but I guess we really are going back to the good old days. A broken government that’s reduced to being nothing more than an armed enforcement agency and a pass through organization for tax dollars to go straight into the pockets of rich political contributors is certainly the natural result of endless tax-cutting and GOP corruption. But you have to admire the pluck of those who actually find ways to make an extra buck off of the more wealthy criminals who have the misfortune to get caught. That’s what I call All American know-how.

A lot of people will say this is part of a “starve the beast” strategy, but I’m not sure I believe that anymore. The Republicans just run on cutting taxes while promising all kinds of government largesse to get elected and get their hands on the treasury. It’s a very nice little racket that has far less to do with any kind of political philosophy and more to do with their inherent greed and corruption. They go as far as they can until the nation gets fed up and then they leave the field to the Democrats to clean up the carnage.

But the effects are just as bad as if they were starving the beast. As Ezra notes in his piece: “Libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke likes to say that ‘Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.'” The problem with that is that it breeds a reflexive mistrust of government — and (a very difficult to argue) case against raising taxes.

It’s not that taxes were ever popular, any more than paying your electric bill is “popular” or buying a new furnace is “popular.” But until the GOP hit on their free lunch propaganda they were just considered a fact of life (“death and taxes”) as long as the rich weren’t perceived to be getting off easy and the government was delivering services to the people. Republican campaign tactics and governance have pretty much destroyed that resigned acceptance by making people believe that taxes are inherently evil and if the government needs to do something it will magically find the money some other way. The truth is that the Republicans have been running a game that’s the equivalent of you or I taking off work without pay for weeks so we can go to Vegas and play roulette with our credit cards. One only hopes “the grown-ups” haven’t gone so far that we will have to spend the next decade suffering from the hangover.

No matter what, people still need to go to college and troops still need to have body armor and New Orleans still needs to have levees. And according to Ezra there are signs that the citizens are beginning to see through the con:

A new Pew Research Center poll finds that public support for a societal safety net and for government protections is at its highest levels in more than a decade — which suggests that Americans don’t think bake sales are the way to fund their schools or that Philip Morris is really who they want subsidizing law enforcement. And in recent elections, the once popular “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights” amendments that seemed so unstoppable a decade ago are being rejected and, in Colorado, repealed, as voters finally tire of paying the costs in broken infrastructure and insufficient public services.

That’s the opening for the Democrats to make a new argument and I hope they find a way to do that.

Nobody likes paying bills, but at some point in our adulthood most of us accept it. Taxes are just the bill we pay for the services we get from the government, which includes everything from homeland security to pet food regulation to aviation safety. It’s not actually a bad deal considering the kind of interest rates people are paying for their credit cards or the outrageous fees they pay for health insurance. (How about concert tickets!) Perhaps Americans are sobering up after the reckless Republican borrow and steal bender and recognizing that a little straightforward honesty and competent government stewardship is worth the price they pay in taxes. They might even vote for it.

Ezra expands on his piece, here. (Another point for blogs — you can add back in what the editor took out!)

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