I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank hit the mark the other day when he said he’d never seen a tax cut build a bridge. Tax cuts don’t repair highways either, or build city parks, public libraries, new schools, energy grids or health clinics.
President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment economic stimulus package, working its way slowly through Congress at the moment, is clogged up in a partisan tar pit. The GOP is balking, ostensibly “on principle,” reverting to the played out core of its dogma, lowering taxes and promoting “small” government –- so government works for them, and not for the rest of us.
Eliminating taxes on the poor and lowering them for the middle class, while requiring the well-to-do to bear their fair share, is more than the right thing to do, of course. It’s a move toward economic justice. But to say that small government is somehow the best government, and get high-handed about public investment to stimulate employment, is one of those political hypocrisies that hides its stink in righteousness but is eventually sniffed out for what it is.
More than 67 million Americans caught a strong whiff of that odor in the last election. They voted for more jobs, new jobs, and, equally important, massive public investments, or reinvestments, in infrastructure, education, new energy sources and other fundamentals of the public wealth of a nation that’s now down at the heel, and has been virtually abandoned by a government that worked only for the rich.
Public investment is derided by the GOP as “pork,” while bailouts of irresponsible companies are considered “rescue plans.” The hypocrisy of the idea of small government is the notion that there really is a noble world in which private interests are free of government “handouts” and government control.
The truth, as we all know, is that the corporate world has been both favored by government and set free of public control for years and has come close to wrecking our economy.
But there’s another truth too, one that has a double edge. There is no such thing as “small government,” no such thing as an economic system that doesn’t have massive and ongoing, if hidden, government intervention and guidance all the time.
Government always intervenes. It never stops playing favorites. The GOP and its favorite, the ruinous oligarchy of failed businesses and financial institutions, lost the election. But the GOP is still pounding its drum. It still wants government to intervene on its behalf while denying government support to everyone else as if our needs were moral failings.
Every corporate tax break and loop hole, every tax incentive, every highway, bridge, and airport, every infusion of economic diplomacy abroad, every local incentive to business, puts the lie to the idea of the virtue of small government. Incentives, job creation through public investment, and bailouts are all the products of government intervention.
What the GOP calls its no tax, small government “better plan” is simply the same old hypocrisy, giving government support to the same institutions and in the same way that has destroyed our economy.
In supporting public investments to stimulate the economy, John Maynard Keynes spoke of the “multiplier effect” of government sponsored public works. Full employment, publicly or privately funded, creates subsidiary jobs, far more than trickle down economics did or ever could.
Our economy needs public investment jobs now. Our public services and infrastructure need fixing now. And we need to start creating an alternative energy economy now. Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment plan is the perfect fit.
When Keynesian ideas are applied to local politics they become more difficult to tease out, but are just as potent. All local governments play favorites, like the federal government does, through public incentives for certain kinds of jobs and businesses that are located in certain places owned by certain people in certain parts of town.
Small government, in the GOP sense, doesn’t exist on a local level either. In the mayoral election this year, you’ll hear a lot of malarkey about getting government off our backs. But, in fact, in Albuquerque and everywhere else, government has guided growth to certain places, stimulated growth of all kinds for some and, thwarted growth for others.
When one votes, one is voting for who gets government incentives and positive governmental intervention. In Albuquerque, the sprawling Westside has been the beneficiary of endless government, make that taxpayer, subsidies. Government chose to favor one part of the city over other parts, and even went to far as go against strong public sentiment in the North Valley and create a bridge and a highway that would stimulate growth in the part of town, and its property owners, that it favored most.
After the mayoral election this year, a localized version of Keynesian economics will come into play immediately as it always does. Public investments will be made, either to continue sprawl or to favor infill with tax and infrastructure incentives, to support affordable housing or abandon it, to conserve water or subsidize brackish water pumping and clean up, to promote the arts and cultural life or let them flounder, and so on.
In assessing politicians and their programs, the task is rather direct and simple. The interests they favor will be supported by government should they win. It is fatuous in the extreme to suggest that one party favors government intervention and another does not.
