THE STUPID AMERICAN VOTER

RECENT POLLS SUGGEST one third of Americans support or sympathize with the Tea Party movement. That’s scary. That’s downright frightening! What’s even scarier is that more than a third of the voters will vote for Tea Party candidates. They want to “send a message”.

But are they getting the message? More importantly, where are they getting the message from? Sound bites from Sarah Palin’s speeches? Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Fox News? A flood of right-wing Tea Party-affiliated attack ads blaming President Obama and the Democrats for the economic malaise? And if these voters are getting news from other sources, from actual news sources, are they arbitrarily choosing not to believe it? After all, if it isn’t Fox, it’s “lamestream drivel,” according to the Palin Doctrine. And one third of Americans are of this mind! Gadzooks!! We’re all in the toilet, and come election day, unless something changes dramatically, voters will pull the flusher handle and we’ll all go swirling down, down, down, into Toiletland. And once we’re in Toiletland, the first thing we’ll see is a sign that says “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.

Let’s look at the Tea Party movement for a moment. The Tea Party is a vast collection of angry, mostly white, mostly middle aged and middle class or working class citizens who believe the time has come to kick some ass. They blame President Obama and congressional incumbents of both parties for the high unemployment rate, letting companies get away with outsourcing jobs, and for running a socialist welfare state. This movement is largely financed by billionaires, to wit: the Koch brothers, Charles and David, among others. Oceans of money financed campaign ads during the primaries and helped catapult scores of right-wing Tea Party outliers into the general election. They’re influenced by the shrill, pep-assembly rhetoric from Sarah Palin, which is ubiquitous on the cable news networks (can you say “Fox News?”). You can’t get away from it. Far-right minimalists such as Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota are rallying the troops using Fox News (or Faux Nooz, as it's sometimes referred to) as a soapbox. They keep up an incessant drumbeat – “Tax and spend liberals, it’s all Obama’s fault there are no jobs, Washington’s broken and we Tea Partiers can fix it, etc. etc.” And those who have limited access to the full spectrum of information, either by choice or because of ignorance, are gorging themselves on this type of propaganda.

Consider, for a moment, the Tea Party agenda, and the consequences of actually implementing the Tea Party agenda if these people are elected in sufficient numbers to take control of the government. After all, they want to “take America back”. Back to what, the Stone Age? Consider:

Eliminate or privatize Social Security

Eliminate it, and you create enormous hardship, or worse, for seniors and the disabled. For millions of Americans Social Security is the only income they have. Take that away from them and they’ll be on the street. Take it away and you have an enormous hit on spending power. There goes what’s left of the economy! These are people who paid into Social Security their whole working lives! It’s not welfare (well, SSI is, in a sense, but SSI comes out of a different fund). It’s an entitlement. They’re entitled to it! It’s their money! To Tea Party conservatives, entitlement is a dirty word. They think people collecting Social Security are leaching off the American people. But the Social Security Trust Fund, on paper, has a balance of $3.2 trillion – in the black! The problem is that over the years politicians have “borrowed” money out of the Trust Fund to pay for pork, unnecessary wars, nation building, Third World charity, and tax cuts, especially for the wealthy. The Trust Fund now has $3.2 trillion worth of I.O.U.s. in its coffers. Getting rid of it would be unfair to not only seniors, but to everybody who has paid into Social Security. The $3.2 trillion needs to be guaranteed, even if it means adding it to the national debt. In fact, the national debt in effect includes the money in the Trust Fund. But voters aren’t thinking along those lines. They’re stupid.
What about privatizing Social Security? That would simply further enrich Wall Street at the expense of the people. Benefits would be cut and diverted to shareholders and high-level executives through the pipeline that carries money from the common people to the ultra-rich.

Privatize Education

K-12 education is free in this country. Everybody has a chance to have their children educated at no cost if they so choose. Actually, it’s not entirely free – property taxes support public education, but the expense is modest in comparison to private school tuition .Those who have the means may send their children to private or parochial schools and pay the required tuition which is often steep. If free education were replaced by private, profit-making institutions, the spending power of lower-income families will be impacted disproportionately. That’s bad for what’s left of the economy.

Slash taxes, even for the rich

Free-market conservatives tell us that it makes no sense to tax “job creators”, i.e. rich people. “No poor person ever gave me a job” they say, as if that had anything to do with anything. Cut taxes for the job creators and they’ll open up the factory gates and hire millions of workers. That’s what conservative politicians from both parties are telling us. They must take us for the stupid dimwits many of us actually are. The trouble with the Cut Taxes For The Rich theory is that it’s already been tried – by George W. Bush. It didn’t work. Approximately one to three million new jobs materialized during the first seven years of the Bush Administration (as compared to 22 million jobs created during the Clinton Administration). Meanwhile, millions more were shipped to foreign countries with cheap labor and were replaced by lesser-paying service-sector jobs. A lot of spending power was lost, and was only partially made up for with cheaper (and poorer quality) Chinese goods. With less spending power there will be less demand. Job creators will not create jobs just to put people to work. They will create jobs to meet increased demand for their products, if or when that demand materializes. But with so many out of work and with so many who are working making less than they used to, the demand won’t be there. No demand, no jobs.
One thing the Bush tax cuts did accomplish - we’ve gained hundreds of new billionaires during his administration. Income inequality grew substantially, and the money pipeline from the many to the few is experiencing a substantially greater and ever accelerating flow rate.

Slash the size of government

They want to fire teachers, police, firefighters, and other government workers to shrink the size of government. The necessary services they provide would be impacted, and there are no jobs for these displaced government employees to go to. Many who do find jobs will be in a lower income bracket and will have diminished spending power. Result: Less spending power, less demand, and fewer new jobs.

Eliminate Unemployment benefits

Jobs are going overseas at an accelerating pace, and there are a lot of displaced and soon to be displaced workers. Unemployment insurance keeps them in their homes and allows them to spend what little they do make in unemployment benefits, at least for a while. Those lucky enough to eventually find new jobs will be lucky to find jobs that pay as much as their former jobs. The end result: More reductions of spending power, less demand, no job creation.

Balanced Budget Amendment

In a perfect world, we would think the Federal Government, like state governments and ordinary citizens, could live within its means.
Consider this: Imagine you’ve been forced to take a substantial cut in pay – say, 20%. Many workers have had their pay reduced, though not usually by 20%, and it’s caused them hardship nevertheless. To make ends meet people have had to borrow, they’ve maxed out their credit cards and home equity credit, and many have gone under.
So you’ve had to take a 20% pay cut but you can’t borrow a dime. Assume you have no savings. What do you do now? Well, you’ll have to sell your house, if you can, and if you do sell it you’ll most likely sell at a loss. More likely, though, you’ll be in foreclosure because there are no buyers. You’ll lose your house you’ve worked all your life to obtain and furnish. You’ll have to pack the family into some apartment that’ll likely be a dive. Your quality of life and that of your family will be in the sewer.
Here’s the analogy. The government has been slashing taxes for thirty years now, and has been depriving itself of its revenue, or income. It has taken a cut in pay and is not willing to ask for a raise because it’s afraid the boss (the people, especially the Power Elite) might get mad. It has been functioning on borrowed money, including the $3.2 trillion it borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund. Meanwhile, the government insists on conducting arbitrary wars and engaging in nation building endeavors – in other countries. This is all more expensive than our government can afford. We can’t even afford to keep on top of our own infrastructure needs, even without a balanced budget amendment. Now, imagine the chaos and extreme hardship when essential services are cut because “we can’t afford them”, but we can still afford arbitrary wars and nation-building. The guaranteed outcome: the economy will collapse catastrophically. There might even be a rebellion. What do you suppose Tea Party maven Sharron Angle will do if she gets elected and gets her way and helps pass a balanced budget amendment and sees her proposed “Second Amendment remedies” exercised against her?

Now obviously, there is really no alternative other than to ask the "boss" (i.e., the people) for a raise. In other words, raise taxes. But that's a problem - raising taxes is political suicide. It's like putting toothpaste back into the tube. Our taxes have been cut to the bone in recent decades in an experiment with trickle-down theory. It clearly doesn't work - in fact, it has turned out to be a case of runaway trickle-up economics. Wealth is being redistributed upwards from the middle class to the wealthy, and even more so, to the super wealthy. The rich and super-rich wield overwhelming power and influence in our political system, so no congressman or senator could or would want to increase revenue by means of higher income taxes. A so-called "fair tax" or "Value Added Tax", in effect a national sales tax, is appealing to the mega-rich because it wouldn't significantly impact them. They have so much money they couldn't spend it all anyway. For them, it would turn out to be much less than income tax. To the poor and middle class, it would be devastating. This type of tax scheme would have a devastating impact on aggregate demand and would thus further decimate the economy, which depends on consumer spending. A fair tax of 23% is being propagated by some Tea Party candidates, by Rand Paul in particular. This is part of the Tea Party agenda, and this is what voters currently appear to support. These voters are being played by the billionaire backers of the Tea Party movement and are, in effect, being talked over the cliff like lemmings by these master manipulators. They're dis-allowing themselves to be informed on these issues. They're just sloganeering and earping up nonsense. To put it bluntly, they're stupid.

Now, I don’t purport to be an economist, but I flatly deny being an idiot. I watch the news, read the paper, and try to be as informed as I can be. Common sense tells me that the Tea Party will wreck the country - or die trying - if voters put their candidates in charge of our government. The system is broken, maybe beyond repair, but with the Tea Party agenda the system stands to be not just broken, but blown to smithereens. Voting outsiders and outliers into office just to spite the corrupt politicians who are currently running the country might make voters feel good for a few minutes. But like a heroin overdose, the euphoria doesn’t last for long, and the final outcome will not be good.