Paul Krugman makes to two especially salient observations concerning our nation’s malaise in his New York Times column “Eat the future” that also appears today in the Intelligencer Journal New Era.
“How can voters be so ill informed? …[W]hat they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?”
And
“If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)”
The logic? “By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts tea partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters.”
Truly, we have seen the enemy…and it is us, a combination of massive ignorance, self indulgence and greed.
