Gonzalez is a third-year political science student.
By Nathan Gonzales
The Republican Party has long sought to paint itself as the
party of fiscal responsibility, while at the same time implementing
economic policies that simply don’t work.
With a staunch, unwavering determination to crush any government
function that they might label as “socialist,”
“intellectual,” “feminist,”
“environmentalist” or simply “gay,”
Republicans have come to break the federal government while
preaching the law of the jungle.
Since taking control of Congress in the early ’90s, a
special breed of Republicans has come to the forefront of the
American debate, seeking cuts in health care, school lunches, Head
Start, the Environmental Protection Agency, federal home loans,
contributions to veterans’ college tuition, among other
important government programs and services. Furthermore, many
Republicans think it wise to altogether abolish the Food and Drug
Administration (yes, the agency that makes sure we don’t eat
rat poison instead of flour) and the Department of Education.
This anti-government movement was powered by greed and religious
fundamentalism. By greed, I’m referring to the flat-tax rate
proposal of the ’90s. Though it seemed to possess an air of
egalitarianism, the Treasury Department reported that if the
flat-tax had been implemented, the wealthiest one percent of the
population would have gained the most, while everyone under them
would have received next to nothing ““ the upper middle class
and those at the bottom of the economic ladder losing the most in
after-tax income.
Nowadays, this greed has a new face. It’s in the form of
tax cuts in a time of budget deficits, while cuts are being
proposed in other areas, such as health care, education (including
the Drop-Out Prevention and Rural Education programs), the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Low-Income Heating and Energy
Assistance program, federal highway projects, enforcement of job
safety regulations by the Department of Labor, and the budget for
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The question we must ask is the following: Is it fiscally
responsible to put thousands of employees out of work (both from
government and private contracting firms), take away basic services
in a time of rising unemployment, and keep cutting taxes in ways
that are only significant to the wealthiest portion of the
population? Regardless, this is what Bush’s new budget and
economic stimulus package (if you can call it that) seek to do.
During the Clinton administration, federal jobs were cut. In
fact, President Clinton oversaw the most significant downsizing of
our federal government ever, while his free trade policies helped
boost the largest peacetime economic expansion in American history.
But Clinton’s policies mirrored the economic times, and they
never sought to exclude entire portions of the population. The days
of Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who believed in
government intervention to protect civil rights, paving federal
highways, and who warned of the military industrial complex, are
long gone.
In 2002, a great number of seats in Congress are up for grabs.
Remember that if you vote for a Republican, you’re voting for
a congressional leadership that stands against mandatory background
checks on firearms, against the separation between church and
state, against campaign finance reform, a patient’s bill of
rights, a woman’s right to choose, environmental protection,
enforced worker and consumer safety, and most of all, against a
budget based on sound economic principles.
We must avoid derailing the economic progress of the ’90s
by putting an end to Republican voodoo economics. The political
voice that the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution
gave us is based on the premise of democratic involvement. We must
use it in 2002.