While our elected leaders are slashing government spending to bring down the deficit, they’re sadly missing the point. You’d think with the executive and both houses of the legislative branch under Republican control that Bush and Congress just might be on the same page.
Instead, just about every piece of legislation spewing from Washington contains items that defy or negate the stated aims of the administration. Anything too controversial to get passed by the House or Senate on its own merit gets attached to appropriation bills by committees in secret session. They’re voted on by legislators who have never read them.
It doesn’t help that our sitting president has never exercised a veto. Even bills he swore he wouldn’t sign if the cost exceeded a given number sail through the Oval Office with his ink on the bottom line.
Two billion here, three billion there, pledged to alleviate suffering of all kinds. Hurricane Katrina swamps the Gulf Coast. Bush and his appointees scarcely notice until CNN sends pictures of citizens stranded on rooftops, crammed into a sports stadium with no facilities, or floating face down in polluted water. Oil refineries are damaged so oil prices will once again rise. Nudge, nudge, snicker, snicker. High prices for gas and oil are good for old buddies in the business. Guess we should tell people to use less while Air Force One wastes billions of gallons of jet fuel for a half dozen trips south gaining nothing but photo-ops of our fearless leader with his sleeves rolled up. Journalists needed hip boots for the bull pucky more than the floodwaters.
Where is the money going? To mega-contractors for clearing debris. Not to the folks who lost all their worldly possessions, their whole neighborhoods, jobs and relatives. They couldn’t even collect their Social Security, Medicare and disability checks, or paychecks from employers who fled. Meanwhile, Congress gives the money to contractors while exempting them from laws that protect local workers. Residents whose jobs washed away want to work to rebuild their city but can’t because Congress lets contractors hire illegal immigrants at less than half the minimum wage.
Now we agree that Congress must make spending cuts to pay for the billions of federal dollars Bush says will go to disaster relief (and the war). But what do they cut? Medicaid. If this isn’t the most colossal contradiction in budget balancing, it is eclipsed only by extending tax cuts for the rich.
They could have removed the outrageous pork from the Transportation Bill, the Energy Bill, and the subsidies from the Agriculture Bill (offensive as they are to the World Trade Organization). But as long as we elect senators and representatives who shamelessly grab taxpayer dollars for their states and districts, when common sense would dictate the money go where it’s needed, the deficit will only continue to rise.
Bush pledges billions to aid victims of earthquakes in Asia. Where did the money go? There are still whole villages of Pakistanis who haven’t seen a blanket or a tent, boots or a coat, bread or water.
More billions are pledged to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa. But the money has strings attached, and our government means to hold those strings. If the money went instead to the World Health Organization, it might promote education (other than abstinence) on how the virus is contracted and how to protect against infection. God forbid we might tell a young married couple how to use condoms.
Average Americans aren’t stingy. We’re the givingest people on the planet. We give to our churches, our schools, to charity organizations that serve the poor and show where the money goes. World Vision and Doctors Without Borders. We donate blood to the Red Cross and outgrown clothes to the Salvation Army. Give us a worthy cause and we’ll give till it hurts.
If only we had some assurance the government would spend it wisely, most of us would even consider a tax increase. Gasp! Can we even say that?
But the unmitigated greed of our elected leaders and the corporate interests that manipulate them are discouraging our charitable inclinations. It’s not enough to announce to the world that we are pledging billions to alleviate the suffering of our own and other peoples. We’ve got to mean it. We’ve got to see that it’s distributed efficiently and fairly.
And we need to replace politicians who’ve been corrupted by a dysfunctional system always canted toward reelection campaigns with leaders who may still be guided by principles of fairness. And somehow, we need to alter the prevailing corporate ethos, driven by market share and stock prices, to one that rewards ethical conduct.