Sat, June 14, 2003

Because none of my friends and well-wishers has been sweet enough to buy me an Ambient Orb (see link), I still have to check the local weather forecast on the Internet every day like a chump. One day last week, the advertisement on that page was an animated banner ad for President Bush's Freedom Corps. "How can you answer the president's call to action?" it asked. And it offered some examples like "drive food to old people," "take retards to the zoo," "read to a transient." "Hm," I thought to myself. "What an entitled prick. Oh, well. Looks like mid-70s today; I'll wear the blue shirt."

It wasn't something that bothered me too much until I saw Laura Bush on TV doing a PSA for secondharvest.org which has something to do with collecting food donations to distribute to America's hungry. The First Lady was quoting some statistic about how many millions of children go hungry in America, and how it was up to us, the proud citizens, to pull together and give of our hearts so that they could have Toaster Strudel and Teddy Grahams like god intended. Well, let's hear it for synchronicity! The two messages probably wouldn't have sent me into a seething rampage if I'd seen them separately, but taken together they really bothered me.

You see, this was the same week that President Bush was signing a bill to cut $350 billion in taxes. He was saying "The government has enough money. You take it," despite the mounting deficit and the still untallied cost of publicizing the war in Iraq, fighting the war in Iraq, and the ongoing charade of looking for WMD in Iraq. (Not to mention the surely formidable cost of planting WMD in Iraq in the months to come!) The attitude from the White House was that federal programs have all the money they can spend right now. Thanks anyway, why don't the nice American people buy themselves a DVD player? We're doing just fine. And yet simultaneously we're told that our country is in desperate need of every citizen's assistance. Children and the elderly are hungry. Humanity lacks habitats. Retards are missing out on valuable goat-petting experiences. But the administration doesn't want to do provide these social programs. Can't someone else do it?

See, this is what a "compassionate conservative" is, to use a phrase Bush coined in his campaign. He's a conservative, so he wants money to be in the hands of wealthy fatcats, not the government. But he's compassionate too, so he wants ordinary Americans to scrape together and take care of society's huddled masses. Rather than sharing the cost of these social programs across the population by funding them federally, he'd rather give that money to the wealthiest 1% and lay a guilt trip on the other 99% to pick up the slack. Despite the fact that the wealthiest continue to give themselves raises and bonuses while their companies founder and lay off employees in record numbers.

Oh, it's a beautiful thing. "Compassionate Conservatism: I beat the shit out of my gay son, but I pay his nanny to take him out for ice cream afterwards."

The trickle-down economics idea is a joke; we all know that. The wealthy don't spend more when they get more. They save more. The only thing the wealthy love more than money is more money. (I liked one pundit's idea that the wealthiest 1% would take their new cash and fly to France on vacation, spending it all there.) Maybe someday their heirs will spend more, but that hardly seems worthy of hanging your entire economic policy on. And yet there it is. Unflinchingly. All I had to do was whip out my calculator and tally up the example figures on CNN.com to see that the wealthiest bracket stood to gain over 3 times as much from the tax cut as the poorest bracket. (And here I'm talking percentages. In raw cash they make 13 times as much. But the poorest family in CNN's example gains 0.5% of their income in new benefits while the richest will see a whopping 1.6% of their income returned to them.) Don't get me started on the continued incentives for children. Yes, a family with children could use some extra help, but if offspring continue to be the easiest access that poorer families have to tax relief it incentivizes the rampant breeding that creates the overpopulation that leads to such widespread hunger in the first place.

So taxes are slashed, budgets crunched, and the federal debt limit increased. Still, it's the everyday American's fault that children are hungry and veterans lack benefits. On top of that, the conservative doctrine of helping those who least need it extends to the agricultural community. Rather than looking at competition as a healthy cog in the machinery of the free-market economy, conservatives favor subsidies for farmers who cannot survive on profits driven down by flagging demand due to abundance. Instead of giving these farmers the advice given to thousands of dot-com employees jettisoned in the e-commerce crash ("find another skill and profit from that!") the approach is instead to pay them not to grow crops so as to stabilize the supply chain and keep prices high enough to sustain the other farmers. Nowhere else is this logic applied. (Okay, the airlines got a bailout or two, but nowhere else.) If I can't make enough money designing websites, I'm expected to just find another job. I can't whine to someone that it isn't fair and get paid not to design websites.

Instead of secondharvest.org we need firstharvest.org! If hunger is such a problem in America, how about instead of paying farmers not to grow corn, we pay them to grow it and give it to the hungry children? Rather than gazing into the camera with weepy eyes about all of the disadvantages that America's poor are suffering, maybe those eyes should be redirected at the so-called "leader" of the free world, whose actions have exacerbated their plight. Accountability for corporate fraud. Tax breaks for the people who could actually use an extra thousand or two a year. Fiscal responsibility rather than brazen spending. These steps could turn the economy around and provide a more robust social foundation from which outreach programs (volunteered or federally funded) could succeed.

So I turn to the president himself. He should answer his own call to action and start prioritizing America's needy ahead of America's greedy.

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