Republican Debates: Blarney or Bluster?

The Republican Presidential Debates: An Assessment so Far

Watching the Republican candidates debate with each other would be laughable if it weren’t so troubling for the near-term future of our country.

Every one of them claims both that the government cannot create jobs and also that they are the best candidate to create jobs. They all want a smaller government at the federal level but they also want a larger government at the state level.  

No where in the Ten Commandments does it say that states are more trustworthy with our tax revenue than the federal government. (I checked.) In fact, state after state has misused federal revenues allotted to them for Medicare and education programs by spending the money to reduce their deficits.

Same for local control of schools. They would all dismantle the Department of Education. Where is it written that a person who lives in your neighborhood is better qualified to determine a junior high math curriculum than a person in Washington?

The more “local” the control--the more local the prejudices built into the system, so of course people with a parochial outlook prefer local control. Michele Bachmann's for her own political advancement is a case in point.

Even more so is the effort in some locales to spend tax money on religious programs and displays in schools and other public places. It is parochialism hiding behind the pillar of religious liberty. "Localism" needs to be balanced by national values and standards. That's what the Constitution is really all about.

But there is a great irony in all this. Republicans criticize President Obama for "moving the wealth around." They pretend that in an ideal world everyone should keep 100% of their salaries. But they ignore the fact that none of the wealthy people, whom they call "job creators," could make a dime without federal roads and water and electricity.

And they ignore that these "job creators" have been shifting jobs overseas for a generation. And they ignore the fact that most people on the Fortune 500 list inherited their money. As Barry Switzer famously wrote back in 1986, "They were born on third base and thought they'd hit a triple."

Their unanimous bottom line is that government needs to get out of the way so that American's will invest again in manufacturing. Wrong. Americans won't invest and Americans won't manufacture until people start buying again.

It is buying that creates the demand for manufacture, not the other way around. It's called "pulling on the string." Republicans want to "push on the string." The only way to revive our economy is to put money back into the hands of the middle class so they will shop and create more demand for goods.

There is a second irony in the Republicans' attack on the federal government. Republican states benefit much more than Democratic states in the distribution of federal tax monies.

The late New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard sociologist, showed this definitively.   The more populous states--New York, California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia--send more in income taxes to Washington than Washington returns to them to fund federal, state, and local programs. The less less populated states--Utah, Idaho, New Hampshire, Tennessee--get more federal dollars than they actually send to the IRS.

This is a universal truth. It is why the larger Israelite tribes opposed a king and rejected unification until the threat from the Philistines became so great they had to unify (under a warrior, Saul) or perish. The same is true for the American colonies. It was the small states that clamored for union--because they knew they were poor and vulnerable without a federal government. The larger states were the last ones to be dragged in. Their leaders knew that in a union their money and resources would be diluted for the larger good of a single nation.

So the Republican debaters are full of bluster. The federal government has always favored Republican states over Democratic ones.

Republicans candidates love to arouse a fear of socialism. But history has proved Karl Marx to be wrong about his central thesis--that workers would defeat their wealthy oppressors. The key lesson of history is that the higher up one is on the socio-economic ladder the more organized one is to pursue common interests with others at your level.

Today, no group is more organized than the super-wealthy. And they are using their unprecedented influence to reduce the voting power of those lowest on the ladder--the poor, the elderly, students, workers--those who traditionally vote Democratic. The Republican candidates are fighting for those born on third base. And those born on third base--the Koch brothers and their ilk--want to call the middle class out at first.