The Washington Post‘s Charles Lane (4/27/16) objects to politicians following voters’ desires on entitlements because of ” the preemption of actual political choice it represents.”
Now that Donald Trump seems to be a sure thing for the Republican nomination, a GOP-led “entitlement reform” movement is all but done—for now. The Republicans put “entitlement reform” front and center as a major issue in 2012, but given Clinton’s ostensible opposition and the meteoric rise of Trump, who says he opposes Social Security cuts, the legendary “Grand Bargain” is now on the political back burner. This, predictably, has left some of the “entitlement reform” holdouts very upset.
First, resident Washington Post fat-trimmer Charles Lane, in “Entitlement Reform, RIP” (4/27/16), lamented that a Trump/Clinton match-up means “entitlement reform” is all but dead. The Weekly Standard‘s Mark Hemingway (4/28/16) incredulously asked, “Whatever Happened to Entitlement Reform?” And the emerging “Never Trump” crowd, which is rushing to find a third party to help bring back the Romney-Ryan reform magic — including Sen. Ben Sasse, who published a call for an independent candidate, based largely on prioritizing “entitlement reform.”
There’s really no mystery why a public struggling to get by after watching Wall Street get trillions in interest-free loans isn’t eager to fork over their Social Security checks. And the fascinating part of all this concern with “stealing from future generations” is it almost never includes military spending or the trillions in offshore tax shelters. Even if one accepts the claim that Social Security and Medicare are urgent issues “bankrupting” our country, it’s curious why other things that also cost trillions don’t appear as part of that conversation.
By framing the problem, to the extent that there is one, as being the things the average citizen is “entitled” to—rather than the things military contractors and billionaires are afforded—we limit the scope almost entirely to the most vulnerable among us.
The Post’s Lane rarely writes about tax avoidance that cost the United States government at least $3 trillion a year — $500 billion of which is in tax havens and corporate avoidance schemes. His one attempt to gesture toward it was an argument in favor of a consumption tax—widely seen as regressive. He fails to harp on the problem of military spending overages. One of the few times Lane did complain about the Pentagon’s budget (9/3/14) he focused entirely on “reforming” the pensions of veterans. Indeed, his entire argument was that the Defense Department’s ability to take on “Putin’s aggression” and ISIS (e.g., blow things up) was being hampered by socialist-style healthcare for our vets:
As the United States’ defense budget shrinks relative to its economy, more and more of it is destined to purposes that have little, or nothing, to do with deterring or, if necessary, winning wars in the here and now.
Missing from his argument was anything on the corporate welfare side: No mention of an absurdly wasteful F-35 program whose lifetime costs are expected to exceed $1.5 trillion. No mention of the approximately $1 trillion cost of upgrading America’s nuclear weapons system. No mention of the over $4 trillion we set aside for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To “entitlement” reformers, only that which is guaranteed to the most vulnerable — the elderly, the sick, veterans — is in urgent need of cost-cutting. Everything else is an existential necessity, the wisdom of which is simply taken for granted.
Hemingway’s arbitrary concern for costs is even more cynical. Not only has he never called for a reduction in spending (not even to slash the pensions of those greedy Iraq War veterans), he—and the Weekly Standard in general—routinely call for America to increase its military spending. Indeed, they ran a sort of defense of the costly F-35 program, and aggressively lobbied for the multi-trillion-dollar war in Iraq.
The reason these pundits don’t spend time on non-“entitlement” costs, the expense of running a global empire and handing out tax breaks to the super rich, is entirely ideological. By simply asserting a premise — that military spending is untouchable, and tax-avoidance is a cost of doing business — they stack the deck in the wealthy’s favor and shift the burden to those groups least likely to have their voices heard in corporate media.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Charles Lane does know how to keep on Fred Hiatt’s good side. Wars for the rich, starve the grannies.
~
It ought be pointed out, for all it’s worth, that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the US is a signatory, requires nuclear weapons states to move with alacrity to build down their nuclear arsenals toward their complete elimination. By committing the $1 trillion to a “new generation” of nuclear weapons, not only is Obama betraying the promises he made several years ago in his speech to the world promising to lessen the urgent and existential threat of nuclear weapons, but it makes the US in naked violation of the NPT. Ironically enough, it was a scant 18 months ago that the punditocracy was accusing Iran of being in violation of the treaty, even though something on the order of 6 different US intelligence organizations had been reporting that to all ostensible proofs Iran was in compliance with the treaty that allows use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, which is to say electricity generation and nuclear medicine. Why they would want to is a whole other issue. I’m not so sure the reason why reactionaries such as those mentioned in the article and the Weekly Standard in general, whose cleanup hitter William Kristol got Iraq 2003 completely wrong and paid zero penalty for it, advocate the austerity they advocate for for ideological reasons. More likely their stockholders in corporations such as Lookheed, BAE Systems, Boeing and that whole claque of horsemen of the apocalypse.
You are rehashing the well know misery of the problem,
so, are you trying to destroy the place?
WHAT EMPIRE USA IS ALL ABOUT
No-risk enforcement, this is the goal of our police when they jail (victimize) the homeless, a class that legalized killers consider sub-human as they have not the intelligence to earn a living wage, the most helpless and harmless souls there could ever be.
Sub-prime mortgages were designed by the supremely intelligent rich nobility for the express purpose of giving temporary ownership of luxury homes to the impoverished laboring-class, all the sucker-bait investors into thinking they can forever enrich themselves upon the misery of a less intelligent class.
Medium speed thinkers are the average tax payers, ultra speed thinkers are those of High Society and the fake morality that mainstream media uses to turn society into a madding crowd, this is the illusion that the spice of life is to win something for nothing and glory in being above the loosers. Said it all did our hero Paul Newman in his movie The Hustler,
“Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.”
Directions: Cut from bottom, taking care to avoid contact with essential elements
Entitlement indeed. We pay into them.
We are Empire USA, the most wealthy nation ever, a nation that has plundered unto ourselves over half the wealth on earth. So, if there was among us any honor among thieves, all that wealth would be evenly distributed and each of us would have a net worth of over a quarter million.
Instead, the powers that be have decided that the laboring-class lower half of society shall be enslaved by poverty and that entitlement programs shall be the bare bones minimum needed to prevent a revolt.
Back in Oct Hillary was making noises about weakening Social Security–starting it down the path of means tested “welfare”.
So if she’s elected we’ll see that kind of thing proposed.
When he talks of social security as an entitlement, he is speaking of a program that has never added a cent to the deficit. Corporate and military entitlements add huge sums to the deficit.
By law, social security cannot add to the deficit. If we have to start using the trust fund, we may have to lower payments but that is sometime in the future and easily fixed if congress wants to (which the republicans don’t want)