Propose a national health care program to cover everyone, or invest a mere $7 billion per year over five years to expand the children's health insurance program? Sounds like "each according to need" Marxism. But spend several times that amount to bail out AIG, the nation's largest insurance company? That's, um, market stabilization.
While we're debunking myths, now is a good time to revisit those free-market, tax-cutting promises that economic conservatives have been feeding us for years.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average recently dropped to the level it was back in summer 2001, when Mr. Bush signed the first of his four income-tax cuts. That means that if you put $5,000 into blue chip stocks seven years ago, and rolled another $5,000 into sweat socks and hid them under your mattress, your socks and your stocks would have about the same value today.
And you may have to break those socks out now, because the government's proposed $700 billion bailout of the mortgage and finance industries will translate into $4,000 from the pocket of every employed American. (Plus interest, since the money is all borrowed, and Mr. Bush will soon retire as the fifth straight Republican president to leave office without submitting a single balanced budget.)
Meanwhile, rising unemployment means those who are working will continue to shoulder a larger share of our mounting national debt.
The U.S. economy must generate about 150,000 net new jobs each month just to employ Americans entering the work force from high school, college or the military; in a seven-year period, that requires 12.6 million new jobs just to keep pace. The Bush administration's job creation record these past seven years: 4.7 million.
Those of us who work hard and pay our taxes are getting screwed. Our Christmas bonus this year? The privilege of covering the tab for greedy executives in the deregulated insurance and mortgage industries who scoff at safety nets for you but demand a safety trapeze for themselves.
As I said, we're all socialists now. Too bad all that filthy, pinko socialist redistribution is moving up, rather than down, the economic food chain.
Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at UMBC. His column appears regularly in The Sun. His e-mail is schaller67@gmail.com.
