PAYING - April 22, 2010

The tories, known as republicans, keep saying that they really favor wide-spread health care, but they insist that they want it to be paid by cutting federal benefits rather than adding to the debt. In this, they imagine they are presenting the face of fiscal restraint, rather than throwing the poor to the wolves. They keep hidden the idea that the bulk of the cost should be paid by those who have benefitted disproportionally from the changes of the past ten years and the cutting of high-level taxes. This cutting benefitted from tory politics and these were pursued relentlessly, with no concern for the enormous growth in the debt. It is clear that a reasonable policy would be to load the bulk of any rise in the cost of health care on the class that has benefitted so greatly and so irresponsibly from that dereliction of duty. However, the liberals have not answered that the reasonable source of the money would be from the richest quarter of the labor market, who have collected all the prizes in the past 40 years or more. Yet, oddly, the liberals do not make this argument in defense of fiscal responsibility, probably because of a sense that the idiots who have argued that taxes are optional and that taxing the rich might impede the recovery from the threat of Depression, these demagogues have hoodwinked the People to the degree that they are not about to mount the electoral barricades in defense of this kind of fiscal sense. The liberals are not even willing to rest on the example of B Clinton, who did raise taxes to clear away most of the debt until Cheney came along with his passion for what he must have imagined as world-dominating war. As long as they are silenced by the hypocritical claptrap from the right, they are abandoning the responsible route of taxing to pay the cost of a decent society. If they will not stand up for making the rich pay their some of their luxuries as the cost of health care for all, maybe the People will throw them out of Congress.