The proposed budget from the White House is a mean-spirited, minimal, and squalid picture of this administration’s Ideal Government. That, after all, is the function of any budget — the household budget is a plan for the ideal month or the ideal year for expenditures. So, if this is the administration’s ideal state, it’s pathetic.
At bottom, it’s a massive transfer of wealth from working Americans and small businesses, to the wealthy and multi-national corporations. It supports the military-industrial complex, but not the workers who build the various machines of war. It supports the fossil fuel industry, but not those who labor in the oil fields, or want to make the family budget stretch to putting more gasoline in the tank. It is a budget which quantified people without adding to the quality of their lives. It is a budget that is all stick and no carrots.
It is a budget which calls for more people to “save” for the exigencies and emergencies in their lives without granting them the tools needed to secure their own futures. It is a budget which tacitly blames people for circumstances that are beyond their control. It is a budget that assumes the mythology of the fictional Horatio Alger, without bothering to read the book in which our young hero goes from rags to riches by marrying the boss’s daughter.
It is a budget that insults the American public — as if we don’t “need” the documentary films by Ken Burns on PBS, as if we don’t “need” exhibitions of art in our museums, as if we don’t “need” programs like art and music in our schools, as if we don’t appreciate the services of our local libraries. It is a budget that presumes that only the cultured (and rich) who can afford to buy the books, the art, the travel to faraway places, will actually benefit from the accessibility to the arts and humanities. It is a budget that assumes no quantifiable benefit will accrue to a youngster from a family with limited resources who sits in a library thumbing through a book on dinosaurs, or the planets, or flowers and wildlife.
It is a budget that denigrates the efforts of a mother who takes the kids to the museum on a Saturday, the father who sits with his sons and daughters to watch a PBS documentary on “American Experience” and asks questions of them afterwards to see what they’ve learned.
It is a budget that doesn’t even keep the families safe. It cuts expenditures for promising medical research, for containing the dismal prospects of epidemics, even for the ‘welfare observations’ made by the volunteers from Meals on Wheels who not only deliver food to elderly relatives who want to remain in their homes, but observe and report circumstances that impinge on that person’s safety and health. What the family wants to know is that an elderly grandparent is Okay today, and tomorrow. There will be a time when independence is no longer an option, but as long as the grandparents, or great-grandparents, can stay in their beloved homes, and the relatives can be assured they are safe; programs for the aging help keep those homes safe and the occupants secure.
It is a budget that doesn’t even keep struggling families safe from food insecurity. A full pantry is to be the responsibility of the family. Except real life doesn’t quite work like that. If the family consists of a mother who stays home (the traditionalist Ideal) and a father who has a minimum wage job, filling up the cabinets and refrigerator with food is a daily struggle. Even when both parents are working keeping up with the dietary needs of two children puts the “insecurity” into the food equation. No one is safe who is unfed. Dietary deficiencies have medical consequences. The Army found that out during World War II when many draftees had to be rejected for dietary related physical conditions; the result was the school lunch program.
It is a budget that presumes that all police officers and law enforcement agencies operate in a realm reminiscent of Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. There is no need to fund community policing because every officer walks his beat, knows every family in the neighborhood, and returns silly children to the safety of their living rooms. The founding philosophy of this budget is that parents really don’t have “The Talk” with their POC offspring, ignoring the point that policing services are better and safer when the people in the neighborhood feel secure talking to their law enforcement officers.
It is a budget that threatens the safety of entire cities. Air and water pollution regulations, decried by ultra-conservatives as destructive of jobs (never specified), are to be relaxed. Smog is really no respecter of neighborhood boundaries. Pollution of ground water resources doesn’t respect city limits or county boundaries. Chemical spills endanger our very own habitat. Toxic emissions don’t magically evaporate. There are health implications for all deregulation. There are insurance implications for all deregulation. There are property value implications for all deregulation. As property values decline in neighborhoods susceptible to pollution, so do the revenue prospects of the very cities and counties which rely on property taxes. Deplete the tax base and we diminish the ability of the community to deal with the results of environmental pollution.
It is a budget by and for bullies. It is an Ideal Plan for beefing up our military, with all manner of equipment with which we can bully those with whom we share this planet. It is not a budget — an Ideal Plan — for talking to our allies, approaching our foes, and addressing the concerns of those who are unsure of our motivations. It is a budget which allows the selfish and successful to announce firmly that they don’t intend to pitch in a dime more than they must toward satisfying the needs of their fellow citizens. It is an Ideal Plan for a mean-spirited, minimal, and squalid vision of America.
Desert Beacon 