GOP: Actively Courting a Depression.

I’ve often hinted, but seldom written of my belief that the GOP ideological strategy that remains within what’s left of the Reagan GOP is now devoted to literally courting an economic depression. This is presently being demonstrated by the almost universal Republican obstruction of the fiscal stimulus plan (H.R. 1). In both Congressional bodies, for example, the GOP offered amendments that literally would have stripped the economic plan of any spending whatever and replaced direct spending with tax cuts and other tax-related provisions. Both measures garnered a vast majority of GOP votes, and no Democratic votes, not even Blue Dog fiscal conservatives. Their substitute, remember, would have provided the following amounts for

— increased unemployment coverage . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0

— aid to states . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . $0

— infrastructure construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .$0

— school maintenance and construction . . . . . . . . . . . . $0

— flood and storm damage reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$0

and more and more zeroes for more and more vital programs. Additionally, via its complete reliance on tax cuts, the GOP alternative would cause a massive shortfall in tax revenues that would starve essential government services and responsibilities (like the Armed Forces, payments on the national debt, the NIH, CDC, etc.). In addition, since most Americans actually desire the services that government offers, constricted tax revenues would cause the near future federal deficit and national debt to take off like a wingnut from a gay pride march.

Admittedly, these amendments were offered with no chance of passage, but that they were offered at all speaks volumes about the mental status of much of the House and Senate Republican caucus. You can see which Republicans are completely unmoored from Spaceship Reality by perusing their votes here and here on the Senate and House all-tax-cut “stimulus” plans. As Lawrence Summers and President Obama and many others have observed in the last few days, the supply side economic theory (never accepted as anything more than what The-Other-President-Bush labeled “Voodoo economics”) has been tried and found – about $3 trillion – wanting. The American people, it turns out, actually want a federal government, and, by the way, state and local governments as well. Grover Norquist’s dream of shrinking the federal government to a size where it can be “drowned in a bath tub,” is simply not the truest American impulse, although the image does provide a delightful view inside Mr. Norquist’s compassionate conservative mind. Most Americans simply want government that works. Defining “works” is, of course, the great game of our times, and the business classes, represented by the remaining GOP, simply operates best, it believes, when it controls and provides nearly all services presently offered by governments. It especially prefers deciding which services will be provided to which constituencies at what cost.

Courting Depression. Simply put, I believe the remaining GOP – at least the portion that supported the tax-cuts-only amendments to H.R. 1 – does not wish to see the country recover from this Lesser Depression, at least not on Obama’s fiscal stimulus “watch.” The GOP courts, I believe, through cagey and disengenuous obstructionism, and the inevitable delay it entails, a massive depression, 1930’s style. Their anti-tax and deregulation agenda have for many years been directed at this seminal moment. As Naomi Klein might say, they invite a crisis whereby they can then go to the country and proclaim that governmental intervention “doesn’t work,” and that the federal government has, therefore, ceased to justify its existence.

Then would quickly follow the application of GOP shock therapy, bluntly applied via putting in place a form of outright laissez faire economics never before attempted in the United States. Government services that once provided the essentials of a nation, gone. Taxes. Gone. Services for the poor. Gone. Unions. Gone. Reasonable wages. Gone. Unemployment insurance. Gone. Public health. Gone. Disability rights. Gone. Employee rights. Gone. Middle class. Gone. Social Security. Gone. Pension security. Gone. Medicare. Gone. Medicaid. Gone.

Hidden in Plain View. As I say, they’ve courted this for years, not, I hasten to add, through back room “conspiracies.” There’s nothing secretive about it. They’ve slyly hid it in the open. The underlying ethic they’ve supported since the New Deal and, eventually, via their standard bearer in Ronald Reagan, has been designed to whittle away at the care and feeding of government, and people, at all levels but the wealthiest, whom they’ve fed extravagantly. Each successive GOP administration or Congressional majority has sought to “govern” badly, either by undercutting executive agencies’ budgets, agendas, or ethics; by staffing them with incompetents, political plants, or individuals downright inimical to the agencies’ missions; or by privatizing them into nonexistence for their own profit alone.

On the tax side they’ve sought to reduce taxes at every turn in order to starve government functions, and to run government through deficit spending, thereby intentionally creating the resultant massive national debt, now held in great amounts by foreign governments. It should be no surprise that in the last 20 years the GOP “discovered” that “deficits don’t matter.” Ron Suskind reported, for example, that Dick Cheney, once a deficit hawk, told then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill:

“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

O’Neill shook his head, hardly believing that Cheney – whom he and Greenspan had known since Dick was a kid – would say such a thing.

O’Neill is described as leaving Cheney’s office in a “mild state of shock.” Well, he shouldn’t have been. The ideological core that energized the long slog from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush crafted the deficits, and increased the national debt. This was the blunt instrument that would cause, they hoped, the demise of government; and as those famous words from Casablanca, it was a long term project, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Yes, they often spoke with what appeared to be conviction about the evils of deficit spending, but did they follow through? Of course not. Deficits were demanded by an ideology set against government. Deficits were consciously matched with and supported the starvation and interference with agency work, and, of course, the mantra of deregulation. You think Michael Brown at FEMA was a mistake? With all their tools, the GOP went on to carve out a deficit creation record that would have left Reagan breathless, and, perhaps, shocked by their overreaching.

J’Accuse! Should they succeed in booby-trapping the fiscal stimulus plan and thereby plunge the nation into its Second Great Depression, the GOP will then turn on a dime, and slyly in full hoodwink turn to the American public and say, “See, government doesn’t work! Its meddling caused the depression!” and other self-fulfilled prophecies pulled from their Voodoo Economics Textbook and ideology of greed and craven selfishness. “Self-fulfilled” because their policies of starving agency talent and budgets resulted directly in agencies that, indeed, do not work as well as they could. “Self-fulfilled” because it’s been GOP policies of radical deregulation that fueled the collapse that they already try to blame on Democratic policies dating back to, of course, FDR.

This is their moment, and they believe the truly wealthy will ride out a depression quite well; indeed, they’ll profit from it buying up distressed real estate, company stock, and low cost inflation adjusted bonds. The rest of the country, the 90% who will suffer, will thus be understandably primed for the GOP laissez faire message; no one, GOP ideologues think, will want to talk “socialism” anymore. It’s the GOP plan. And Americans have been quite literally robbed of effective government for many years because of it. And now we’re being driven to a massive depression if we do not stand up to them and say simply, loudly, and repeatedly,

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