Michael Tomasky’s American Prospect columns are invariably smart and inspiring that they’ve entered my weekly must-read list. This week’s piece is particularly good, taking on the Democrat’s hedging as well as the Republicans’ let’s starve the government philosophy:
The second line of attack on the tax cuts will take more courage and imagination. It has to do with Democrats having the gumption to defend government.
Again, 20 years of right-wing rhetoric has persuaded many people that “government spending” is evil — it’s welfare, food stamps, aid to foreigners, grants for degenerate art. The tax-cut argument will always win as long as people hold government spending in such low regard.
In fact, the vast majority of government spending goes toward things that bring direct or eventual benefits to the lives of middle Americans, and that most Americans say they support: defense, homeland security, Social Security, investment in the country’s infrastructure, school lunches, clean air and water, scientific and medical research, highways, local law enforcement, and so on. Of the vast majority of these initiatives, three things can be said: The states can’t fund them because they don’t have the money; the private sector won’t do them because they’re not the private sector’s responsibility; and individual people cannot take their $400 rebate checks, band together, and decide to go clean up the local lake or hire more airport screeners or fund Alzheimer’s research. Like it or not, only the federal government can do, and does, these things.
Why doesn’t any prominent Democrat (or Green for that matter - they at least have the luxury of their convictions, don’t they?) have the courage and the oratory skills to say such things - simply, plainly, and without the sense he or she is simply trying to wash his/her hands of everything that the government does because the Republicans are in power? I know times are beleaguered for the Dems, but it’s like they’re moored between the over-simplified fear of Big (Big Corporations, Big Pharma, Big Brother) of the Nation/Greens/NPR crowd and the misguided belief of the Clintonites and DLC centrists that political ideology is such poison at the polls that it’s worth splitting hairs over tax credits and drug benefit plans.
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