Fiscal foolery

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

MIAMI – We are told by the media and the elite manufacturers of opinion that a specter is haunting America, the specter of a fiscal cliff.

This ghost is really a vampire. It will make its appearance beginning January 2 at a location near you – wherever you live. It will suck blood out of everyone. Well, almost: the middle class, the poor, the sick and infirm, the old and the young, blacks, whites and Latinos, the vast majority who work for their money, all will be hit hard, But the tiny economic class whose money works for them won’t feel the sting at all.

Everyone is equal, but to quote Orwell, some are more equal than others. No place will be spared, but urban areas, Republican code for the large coastal cities where vast numbers of minorities and poor people live – not coincidentally the very metropolitan districts that Paul Ryan blamed for the Republican debacle in November – will suffer most.

Miami-Dade, a county that fits to a t the kind of urban area Ryan was subtly disparaging, will be among those that will feel the pain of the bite and the bloodletting most acutely. Miami is one of a small number of big majority-minority cities in the country, and one with more poor and elderly people than most. That in itself is ominous enough come the vampire. But there is worse. At a time of scandalous levels of inequality across the nation, Miami-Dade is, according to a recent study, the U.S. city with the third largest economic chasm between rich and poor. If there is a place where the very few are much more equal than the many more, this is it. The richest 20 percent rake in on average 29 times what the poorest 20 percent make.

Ghosts and vampires are real only in the imagination of filmmakers and storytellers and their gullible or twisted publics, so why the panic?

The term fiscal cliff, coined by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, confers an image of an almost physical reality and an air of inevitability to what is a purely political concoction. The “cliff” is not on any mountain, fiscal or otherwise. It is the product of a jerry-rigged temporary Congressional deal, one entered under duress struck between a united corps of recalcitrant Republicans intent on extending and deepening their long top-down class war and a divided Democratic Party too scared and too compromised by their own big money contributors to mount an effective resistance.

The fiscal cliff is in a sense a socio-politically constructed mirage. But, to paraphrase an early twentieth century American sociologist, a situation defined as real becomes real in its consequences. The danger of a mushroom cloud required attacking Iraq, we were told. War came but the only cloud was the dust kicked up by the fleeing Iraqi army.

Now the same people who scared Americans with weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist madman now pretend there is no choice to avert falling from a fiscal cliff into an economic abyss except by inflicting economic shock and awe on the vast majority of Americans, either through a blitzkrieg or a long process of attrition.

What the Republicans are offering is a Hobson’s choice: heads I win, tails you lose. If Congress and the president don’t reach an agreement this year, there will be widespread, rapid and savage cuts, with the most vulnerable members of society bearing the heaviest brunt.

But they won’t be alone. The process, technically called “sequestration,” – massacre would be a clearer term – will cut $4 billion in federal education dollars. Health care funding would also be cut, with life or death consequences for thousands. Listing the programs that would be decimated, the populations that will be harmed, and the communities that will hurt, far exceeds the available space.

The local impact would be severe. In a recent opinion column in The Miami Herald, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Anthony Carvalho warned that progress achieved in recent years would be hampered. The public hospital, just emerging from years in a world of financial trouble, would also be set back. The same could be said for many other vital services.

With such a dismal prospect, it should be a no-brainer for politicians in Washington to reach a deal. But here comes the second horn of the dilemma on which the Republicans have managed to impale Obama and the Democrats. In order to forestall a disaster largely of their own making, the GOP is demanding extending further the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. They also want even higher military spending, all while sharply reducing the deficit.

That math would not add up except the Republicans want to make up the shortfall mainly through “long-term reforms in entitlement programs.” Translation: They are demanding permanently gutting middle class programs like Social Security and Medicare and pulverizing programs that benefit poor people to curtail a deficit created by Bush’s wars and tax cuts, by a grotesquely bloated military budget even not considering war expenditures, and by the 2008 financial disaster.

How do the Republicans plan to attain these goals given that (a) these are the very ideas they ran on, and they lost the election and (b) the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose tampering with Social Security or Medicare?

By engineering the equivalent of an economic mushroom cloud, this time for real, they hope that out of fear the people will agree to almost anything and Obama once again will cave in as he did before when he extended tax cuts for the rich to prevent the Republicans from letting the government default.

Most of the major pundits are selling the idea that the solution is a “grand bargain,” basically a deal in which Obama and the Democrats would allow Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid to be “put on the table” – the autopsy table that is – in exchange for Republicans taking their finger off the fiscal hydrogen bomb and raising some revenue by cutting unspecified tax deductions.

This pseudo solution, as Thomas L. Borosage wrote recently in The Nation, would be not a grand bargain but a grand betrayal of the people who voted in the last election in opposition to this self-same Republican agenda. It would also be a betrayal of the most vulnerable, like the one-third of elderly Floridians who have no other income than their government check.

What they failed to accomplish through the election, the Republicans now are trying to accomplish by blackmail and fear. That is to be expected of them. They even have the audacity to act as if they won the election.

Obama won the election, and he must act like he did. Burned once before, he must stand firm this time and give the GOP no benefit of the doubt and no quarter. The people of this country stood up for Obama. Now he must stand up for us.