Small Minds, Not Government

A conservative obsession that is so wrong

Only an ideologist would start with the answer and then find ways to justify it without bothering to determine what the questions are or should be. Thanks to clueless, overrated Ronald Reagan, there is a mantra among conservatives that government should be small. The reasons are not based on anything more than tenets asserting government is the problem and antithetical to freedom and self-reliance.

What is invariably missing from this perspective is facts. It has been described as a fact-free bubble — a vacuum of intellectual dishonesty that treats reality as nonexistent. There are so many examples that I’ll just pick a few to illustrate the problem. A favorite is that lower taxes drive economic growth. It sounds like it could be true, except that tax cuts (known more correctly as tax spending) rarely pay for themselves. Whereas each dollar of food stamps will generate about $1.50 in economic activity, a dollar of tax spending typically generates less than a dollar of economic activity. Unemployment benefits create something like $1.75 in economic activity.

Then there is trickle down economics, also known as supply side economics, but more properly labeled as voodoo economics. It does’t work, has never worked and cannot work. That’s because it was invented in a so-called conservative think tank (an oxymoron) and is not supported by economic data. All it does is redistribute wealth upward, thus enabling the phenomenal gain in wealth of the now infamous 1 percent while the middle class loses economic ground and even declines in size. It’s not the wealthy but an economically strong middle class that enables sustainable economic growth in any economy.

Finally, there’s the deficit and debt mania of conservatives. First, let me note that anyone who says you can’t spend what you don’t have is either dumb or lying. Credit is older than money and drives every economy that’s successful. More importantly, the problem isn’t too much spending but insufficient tax revenues. The U.S. has one of the most inefficient taxation systems in the world, as measured by taxes as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product). The U.S. is also one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t have a national sales tax — also known as a value added tax or VAT. This is the most efficient tax of all, but being so exceptional, America doesn’t have it. It’s so efficient that taxes on labor and capital could be reduced and there would still be more tax revenue than there is now.

Keep in mind that these conservative ideological tenets are not actually the agenda. The real agenda is less government and less regulation — and less tax revenue will help achieve this. Not because it’s a good idea based on information, facts and data, but rather because it’s a psychologically driven point of view. That’s why conservative talking points are devoid of real numbers and supporting data. Their “answers” are really fabricated to support a disdain for government in general, as well as the poor (who are an affront to conservative ideals) and anything that costs business money or reduces the wealth of the rich. They believe in a plutocracy, not a true democracy (but will never admit to this).

Cutting government spending is not popular with those who understand not only how important government is to so many aspects of a modern, civilized society, but also that this spending is some 40 percent of the economy. Austerity actually slows and then stops economic growth. Cutting the debt through austerity doesn’t work well. Spending that drives economic growth does work well because it’s the increased tax revenues that most effectively reduce deficits and debt. The only way to avoid knowing this is to ignore it, pretend it’s not there.

Pragmatists, also referred to as centrists or moderates, can disagree on the details of what to do, but agree on the facts and thus the questions to be asked and then be answered. Conservatives have become increasingly rigid in their approach to governance as they perceive that fewer voters are accepting their message. More mainstream Republicans and business executives now realize that this march further to the right is bad for business and bad for the party. How this will play out in elections may determine if the decline of the U.S., a result of political gridlock and thus a failure to govern responsibly, can be slowed, perhaps stopped and even reversed.