Guns or butter?

Pardon the political intrusion, but every once in while one of my more deeply buried multiple personalities, which cares about these things, manages to seize the conn ...

Prior to the election of 2000, one of the bits of conventional wisdom was that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Gore and Bush. One of the bits of conventional wisdom that came to replace this (as the Bush regime plunged us into war abroad, alienated us from our allies, ravaged freedom at home, and put a hurting on the polar icecaps) was that there was in fact a huge difference between the two. As someone who voted for Ralph Nader, I've done penance for this for many years. I'm willing to concede that there was indeed a larger denomination of difference, and I think the world is a worse place for having been subjected to going on eight years of shrubbery. Still, as a new silly season bears down upon us, I'm once again left to ponder how much difference there really is between one side and another.

For instance, Giuliani has anointed himself the heir to Bush's militarism, authoritarianism, contempt for dissent, and rejection of the sovereignty of other nations. He seems to like fetuses a whole lot more than he used to, and is looking forward to owning beach front property in Dutchess County.  In contrast, we have the populism of Edwards, whose positions can best be summarized by writing down a list of Bush's policies and inserting the word "not" before every verb. Then there's Huckabee, the absurd holy roller, and Hillary the soulless technocrat. It's easy to find dipole pairs of elephants and donkeys, (or elephants and elephants or donkeys and donkeys) and compare and contrast until the cows come home.

Ultimately, though, this is a fool's errand because the terms of debate are so constricted. On the environment, the battle lines are drawn over which pseudo-alternative energy technologies will be subsidized. On issues of "security", the question is which restrictions of the Patriot Act will be retained. On health care, it's a matter of nibbling at the edges of the absurdity of a system built on the inherent conflict of interest between for-profit insurance paid for by employers and sick people.

But perhaps greatest lost opportunity is the war because no candidate or other significant figure in the mainstream has taken the matter beyond the questions of "what were Bush's reasons for going to war?" and "how long should we stay in Iraq?"  None of them asks "why militarism at all?"  In this domain, I really think they're all minor variants on the same theme.   

Suppose any of the three big lies of the war (WMD, Saddam hearts Al Qaeda, democracy flowering in the desert) had a shred of legitimacy, and the cases for any were not manufactured entirely out of whole cloth.  Would any of the candidates of either party (except maybe Kucinich, who doesn't really count) oppose the war, even as currently prosecuted?  Frankly I doubt it.   I think some of them were and/or are troubled by Bush's deception and with the way he actually did things on the ground.  But to say that you're against the war now because it turns out Bush was bullshitting (or to say that you were against it at the outset because of concerns about the particulars) is really to say that you accept that there is a case for invasion other than pure self defense and that aggression is an appropriate tool in our international relations kit.

A true opponent of the war would say that even if everything Bush had said Iraq in 2003 had been true, he would have voted against invasion, and taken personal risks to make his opposition known. Of the big three Dems, only Obama can get away with saying he opposed it from the beginning, but if you read his published positions more closely, you can see that he's hedging his bets.  He says he was against the war because he didn't think it would work as conceived by Bush, and because it drew resources away from the more important conflict in Afghanistan.  Those are certainly valid positions, but they strike me as entirely inside the Beltway. 

Looking at how he proposes to end the war, I see more of the same.  He says he'll immediately begin withdrawing "combat" troops and not build "permanent" U.S. military bases (good), but it's clear that he intends to maintain a sizable American military presence.  More importantly, there's nothing in his budget positions about reducing the level of military spending in Iraq or anywhere else. Edwards and Clinton have very similar positions (though it took both of them quite a bit longer to arrive at theirs). 

Each of the big three (and even in some ways a couple of the Republicans) also makes populist noises about making the country a better place by tinkering with the welfare state.   They even all offer "plans" to fund these changes.  In reality, though, all they really do is spout a bunch of platitudes about taking back the Bush tax cuts and cutting pork barrel spending.    None of them really talks about the kind of fundamental restructuring of national taxation and spending policy that would be needed to make us a bit more like Canada or (heaven forfend) France.

 

So let me just say up front that in some ways I would like this country to be a bit more like France.  I say this out of pure selfishness.  I have elderly, infirm parents, a young child, I'm not rich, and my prospects for financial reversal (absent winning lotto) are dim.  I would like my parents' modest estate to live as long as they do, and maybe even a bit more.  I would like my son to be able to go to a good College and enter a career without debt.  I would like to be reasonably sure that if I keep working more or less as I do now, I can stay more or less in the middle class.  I would like the air we breathe and the pace of the lives we lead to be a bit gentler.  None of these is even close to a certainty within the means at my disposal, and I am well above the median household income.    If I lived in France, it would be.  One option would be to move to France, but there are reasons not to, not the least of which is that I actually like this country.

There are five things that I think could bring these meager dreams a bit closer to reality, and I don't think any of them should require us to stop pronouncing the last letters of words:

• High-quality, free education from infant daycare all the way through university
• "Single payer" comprehensive, universal health insurance, not linked to employment
  
• True medical coverage for the elderly (without all the gaps in medicare, and including coverage nursing homes),
  
• A national plan for improving mass transit and reducing car usage
• An energy policy centered around reductions in consumption rather than exploitation of new resources. 

In other words, your basic left- liberal agenda.  None of this is actually all that radical in light of the things that large numbers of Americans actually say they want.  Some might require us to rethink ideas about freedom of economic choice.  Some might challenge commonly held ideas about moral hazard and entrepreneurship.  All of them would require vast changes in spending at all levels of government.

Okay, so now go ahead and call me a tax and spend liberal.  The thing is, though, I don't think that tax increases are the answer to any of this.  Another bit of conventional wisdom is that France (and Germany, and Sweden, and Holland ...) can all afford generous welfare states because they have much higher tax rates than we do.  Trouble is, this isn't true.  Various studies show that if you factor in the total tax bite (including taxes on real estate, sales, state and local income etc.), America falls somewhere in the middle.  Tax havens like Switzerland pay a lot less than we do, but on average, it turns out that Americans' total tax rate is about the same as Germans' and Frenchmen's.

The big difference is that the typical middle-class German or Frenchman actually receives some direct services that have a real bearing on quality of life from the national government.  In contrast, non-retired middle-class Americans basically get nothing from the feds.  So what do we get that Europeans don't?  We get a military.  A really big one.  Big enough to fight major wars on multiple fronts without resorting to conscription.

We have been trained to believe that this is something that we need and can afford.  The truth neither is the case.  As our rising national debt makes clear, we definitely can't afford it.  The rhetoric about the irresponsible Bush tax cuts are a bit of red herring.  Sure, they've made a difference (especially in out-year projections), but the real hit to the Federal budget has been Iraq.  Pretty much nobody but Bush disputes this.

But what about the need part?  We need a strong defense don't we?  Okay, we do, but not this strong for two reasons.  First, the level of "preparedness" is wildly disproportionate to the threat.  The cold war is over.  The greatest threat to our survival is no longer military.  It is economic (i.e., China, and soon India).  We need enough military to make anybody think twice about fucking with us or our most important or favored allies.  We'd have that if we spent a quarter of what we spend now.

 Second, and perhaps more importantly,  having a huge military tempts us to use it.  Our national mythology is that we fight on the right side and enter wars to rescue the downtrodden from tyranny.  Truth is, we've done that relatively few times, and during the eras when we've had growing standing armies we've tended to use them to overthrow governments and install dictatorships. Sweden used to do this to, 300 years ago, when they had an empire.  Now they have Ikea, and life is good.

To tie this all together, what I would like to see in the campaigns is a real discussion of how our government should set priorities.  Do we want to fill the hole in the medicare donut, leave no child's be ... uh leave no child behind, improve our transportation infrastructure, put our country back at the top of the basic research charts, land on Mars ...?  Well we can't do all (or most) of those things and be orders of magnitude more militarily large than the rest of the world combined.  I would like to see every presidential hopeful present a pie chart of how he would allocate the current federal budget among major priorities.  Use the current CBO revenue estimates.  No fudging about new revenues from better tax compliance or cutting bridges to nowhere in Alaska.  Given a pie the same size as the real thing, how would you cut it.  This would force them to confront what they want out of a military, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

Okay, I know.  Nader isn't running this year.