We weren't supposed to have a standing army either, much less one like we have today with an inflation-adjusted budget as high as during WWII, but here we are. Madison would be appalled, Washington would be ok with something but not that.
Conveniently, the far-right in the US omits the military from balanced budget debates, since any reduction in military spending would disrupt the status quo.
I feel that we haven't had civic discourse around this stuff since Newt Gingrich started his Contract with America. Or maybe before that with Paul Weyrich's New Right religious conservative movement with Reagan:
The fallout of that ideology today is gerrymandering and various other forms of disenfranchisement to maintain minority rule by the religious right and moneyed corporate interests. Which doesn't align with the separation of church and state, but again, here we are.
So you're correct that our history of denying aid to people in need goes way back. But we should also remember that women lived under subjugation until their right to vote was recognized in 1920, and people of color lived under segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We probably shouldn't use the term "aid", because reparations to repair the theft of those peoples' livelihoods would be an astronomical number, easily into the tens of trillions of dollars. The same people who thought those progressive movements were crazy continue to call aid to those in need "redistribution" today.
These are heated enough debates, with people's beliefs informed by trauma and shame, that I feel rational discourse around them may be impossible. We'd have to go back 40+ years and prevent the undermining of our public education system, which is exactly what student loan forgiveness is attempting to do. In the meantime, all we can really do is vote out our opposition, and not buy into propaganda such as the recent movement to discredit institutions like the FBI and democracy itself.
For a refreshing look at the real history of the US and more info like this, I highly recommend Thom Hartmann's show on FSTV (no affiliation):
Yes, these topics are often heated, but they are important and central to our national politics.
You may disagree, but I don't think the government's primary job is to gather funds through taxation and allocate those funds to certain groups.
The government should provide basic services in a non-discriminatory manner and maintain laws free of bias. I reject the idea that the citizenry are simply a resource to be exploited and used to carry out the good work of the government.
Due to the gross power imbalance between the individual and the state, the state should be limited in it's ability to coerce, even if it is for noble and utilitarian purposes. It is not just to enslave someone in pursuit of a higher good. If the objective is noble, support should be voluntarily given.
It is a lot easier to tell someone to support your charity or you will put them in jail than to convince them to voluntarily do so, but doesn't make it ethical in my mind.
Ya fair enough, I don't entirely disagree, and admittedly have a blind spot around government overreach. We may not be able to have liberty with excessive taxation, but it's important to remember that we also can't have justice when we fail to tax the wealthy and dump that tax burden onto the working poor.
There was only a short period of time of about 50 years between FDR and Reagan when we did tax the wealthy, and it created the middle class and made the US the top economy in the world. I'm concerned that the relentless call to cut government spending that we hear on mainstream corporate news obfuscates the full equation. If we were to do what they propose, we would be all but guaranteed to fall into maximum wealth inequality and the government would be at the whim of corporations, if it isn't already. It would bring the end of the American dream by turning the US into a nation-state of company towns where workers are at the mercy of their employers, paid pennies on the dollar for their labor, with no help coming from the government. We'd have to trust the benevolence of the wealthy, which breaks trust-but-verify, as we've seen decades of corruption like the savings and loan scandal, Enron, the housing bubble bailouts, insurance bailouts, embezzlement (is that the word?) of TPP loans, many more that I couldn't list here.
After writing that out, I suspect that you don't disagree, and that maybe I'm dancing around the issue of taking money from one group to give to another. I would propose that we won't be able to see eye to eye on that until these other injustices have been addressed. Basically that the wealthy have already taken monies equivalent to our $20 trillion dollar national debt by lobbying so hard that they set their own taxes to 1/2 or 1/3 what they would have otherwise been. Not to mention that the Pentagon can't account for $20+ trillion, which conveniently matches the national debt too. If we were to look into where the money went, we'd find that (edit: each of) the 150 million US taxpayers have already had something like $250,000 skimmed into the pockets of the wealthy since trickle-down economics began under the pretense of bankrupting the USSR. Now that the main global threat is the collapse of the natural world and displacement terrorism resulting from that, I'd like our taxes to be collected from the groups responsible. The $10,000 student loan forgiveness is small potatoes, just a rounding error compared to that. Which is why I feel that it's a distraction, even if I can't challenge your concerns around redistribution.
IF you look at the common denominator for every exploitation you mentioned, it is that the government facilitated the extraction of funds from the citizenry and payouts to corporations. You also left off probably the biggest grift of the century: US government protected healthcare complex which rakes in 4+ trillion per year.
I don't blame the wealthy or corporations for wanting handouts. I blame the corrupt government for ruthlessly extracting the money from workers and handing it over.
I expect corporations to act in their own interest, but I expect the government to act in the people's interests, and as a protector and good steward of their property and freedom.
I think the best way to avoid government corruption is limitation of scope. As I mentioned in my last post, this is because of the one sided power dynamic between citizen and state. I can withdraw my support from a social benefit charity I think is corrupt. I can not do so with the state.
Student debt and loan policy is indeed small potatoes, but another precedent in the same progression. Who ends up with the money? revenue maximizing universities, corporate in everything but name. The new Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans will make sure that the universities can keep increasing prices and have a steady supply of applicants for degrees with no economic prospects.
The best strategy for any corporation is to use the government extract money from unwilling customers.
Consider that 40% of US GDP now is collected in some form of taxation.[1] 40 cents of every dollar earned by workers is taxed and spent as the government chooses. This is more than between FDR and Regan, and much more than the 20s (~15% of GDP)
Also consider that size of the pie has also increased! US real GDP per capita (accounting for inflation) has grown ~4x since the 1940s, and total GDP has grown ~20x! [2]
Every way you look at it, more and more economic transactions are shifting from individual discretion to flow through the government.
I think we see eye to eye on the symptoms of the disease, but disagree on the cause. I don't think increasing the scope, power, and funding of the government is the medicine we need.
I think we see eye to eye on the symptoms of the disease, but disagree on the cause.
Ya me too. For me, the answer is as simple as progressive taxation. We basically wouldn't tax people making under about $50k per year, since they're living hand to mouth. But we'd set the top marginal tax rate of people like billionaires at somewhere between 50% (my preference) and 90% (the rate that worked best after WWII). That creates a situation where the wealthy can choose to pay their employees or pay the tax. Most employers would choose to pay their employees. We've lost that since the 80s, resulting in stagnant wages. That's the best root cause analysis I've come up with.
I feel that the right is opposed to what I'm saying on ideological grounds, because they don't want higher taxes, period. And they don't want to "punish" success. And they might be wealthy someday too.
Which is all fine and good, but those reasons aren't good enough anymore. The US is falling apart. We're all working far too hard for too little. So I appreciate what you're saying about (if I read it right) regulatory capture. There's some common ground there where the whole country could unify around limiting government overreach. I think that will begin once the right reaches such a pain level that even it organizes around a common cause like higher wages, instead of wedge issues like abortion/immigration/flag-burning/whatever to own the left (which does its own chest-thumping).
Conveniently, the far-right in the US omits the military from balanced budget debates, since any reduction in military spending would disrupt the status quo.
I feel that we haven't had civic discourse around this stuff since Newt Gingrich started his Contract with America. Or maybe before that with Paul Weyrich's New Right religious conservative movement with Reagan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw
The fallout of that ideology today is gerrymandering and various other forms of disenfranchisement to maintain minority rule by the religious right and moneyed corporate interests. Which doesn't align with the separation of church and state, but again, here we are.
So you're correct that our history of denying aid to people in need goes way back. But we should also remember that women lived under subjugation until their right to vote was recognized in 1920, and people of color lived under segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We probably shouldn't use the term "aid", because reparations to repair the theft of those peoples' livelihoods would be an astronomical number, easily into the tens of trillions of dollars. The same people who thought those progressive movements were crazy continue to call aid to those in need "redistribution" today.
These are heated enough debates, with people's beliefs informed by trauma and shame, that I feel rational discourse around them may be impossible. We'd have to go back 40+ years and prevent the undermining of our public education system, which is exactly what student loan forgiveness is attempting to do. In the meantime, all we can really do is vote out our opposition, and not buy into propaganda such as the recent movement to discredit institutions like the FBI and democracy itself.
For a refreshing look at the real history of the US and more info like this, I highly recommend Thom Hartmann's show on FSTV (no affiliation):
https://www.thomhartmann.com