Starve the Beast - Continued

I have been blaming the conservative movement for starving the beast, for robbing Peter to pay Paul – but not really paying Paul at all, and I believe that I’m right in that assessment. But the major complaint must be reserved for those pandering – that’s the politicians who took the campaign contributions. By starving the beast, Wild Bill and all the rest of us had more money to spend, or to paraphrase our great leader, `Who knows how to better spend your money, you or bunch of bureaucrats in Washington?”

The conservatives have sung this siren song of cutting our taxes and getting the `deadbeats' back to work for so long that it is second nature for many to believe it. I’m not going to argue for carrying deadbeats – if I could really identify them other than by resorting to stereotypes – and that’s where they get us. Cutting taxes and spending in almost all areas are the culprits, and the vast majority of us are culpable with the panderers.

Your government – and mine, our presidents and congress have known that New Orleans faced the fate that befell it last week for well over a generation and they chose to put off the need to fundamentally address the issue, praying that the calamity would not occur on their watch. For once, I won’t lay even the lion’s share of the blame on George W. Bush. For a century, federal action, inaction, and policy initiatives in the Mississippi Valley, including the Missouri and Ohio extensions, have been directed in ways that made Katrina’s wrath inevitable.

But it is far more than that. It is in underfunding meat inspection, and border security, and national parks, and veterans care, and a thousand and one other programs not even associated with those `deadbeats’ that we postpone crises in many areas to a day of reckoning – none nearly so dramatic as Katrina, however.

The conservative mantra is that if you cut taxes and spending, the economy will grow and make us rich. Until Katrina made it obvious that that is not necessarily true, it was difficult to point to a real example that even Wild Bill could understand as a counter. But by not investing a reasonable amount in correcting what man has done to the Mississippi all that our so called leaders could do was pray that the inevitable would be postponed until they qualified for their pensions and Medals of Freedom. For more than a generation, the problems in the Mississippi had become obvious to more and more observers, and yet the conservative movement demanded cuts in taxes and spending. The economy will grow us out of our problems.

A reasonable investment in river management made under Saint Ronald Reagan and carried through under Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 might well have mitigated the disaster that we face, but now we must invest an unknown multiplier of those sums to correct a generation of neglect. Thousands of lives and untold billions of dollars in lost gross national product and federal tax receipts will result from Katrina.

But it was up to a single storm to make obvious that we were living on the cheap, and there are more shocks to come. Gasoline prices spiked. The produce of the heartland from Montana to Pennsylvania must be transported but there is no easy method besides the river. The products destined for up river from New Orleans lays stalled out to sea. Will the loss in federal revenue from all these transactions ever be made up?

`Pay me now or pay me later.’ We have starved the beast, and now we must pay. I plead guilty for my share in the debacle.

Hold your president, your senators and you representative in Congress accountable!

Blog on!

Wild Bill