Big-government conservatives (BCG), with the help of the media, have played a major role in directing our nation since the 1980s.
President Reagan was the most influential, prominent and successful BGC of all time. When campaigning in 1980 he blamed the poor economy and inflation on President Carter's deficits, which had averaged $54.5 billion annually. Although Congress did not appropriate all the money Reagan requested, Reagan's budget deficits averaged $210.6 billion over his two terms in office -- almost quadruple what Democrat Carter's had been.
When the eighth-largest bank in the nation, Continental Illinois, foundered in the spring of 1984, Reagan helped rescue it and the government became the owner of the bank. It was effectively nationalized, although the media seldom called it that. The doctrine "too-big-to-fail" dominated his era.
Federal regulators had to rescue seven of the largest banking chains in Texas. The size of his bank rescues were unprecedented in U.S. and world history.
"The federal government became an important owner and manager of financial institutions, able to pick winners and losers, assisting in the consolidation of financial power, providing capital to certain ambitious players and dooming others to extinction," wrote commentator William Greider. Reagan paved the way for a government corporation, the Resolution Trust Corporation, to become by far the largest owner of property in America within two years of his vice president George H.W. Bush, another BGC, becoming president. Imagine the media outrage at Obama if he nearly quadrupled federal deficits for social programs.
Yet Reagan's popularity remained intact, primarily because his bills were left unpaid and the impression was given that they could remain unpaid. Thanks to the media, we recall his sloganeering better than his record.
Concern over deficit problems and debate over national priorities is much more likely to vanish from the front page of newspapers if a self-described "conservative" is the leader.
BGCs believe in the doctrine of government far-sightedness. A far-sighted person is one who can see objects at a distance clearly, but can not see things up close. To conservatives, our government can see with moral clarity just what needs to be done in the Middle East but it cannot see what needs to be done about our own economic problems.
In their view, our government lacks the vision and resources to improve our unemployment problems, health care, and environmental problems. They hold that Washington can never be trusted in domestic matters and yet they expect Palestinians to fully trust Washington's judgment for their matters.
If there is any lesson that emerges in the years since World War II, it is that having enormous military power does not necessarily allow a nation to shape events to its liking. (Recall the U.S. in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and now the U.S. in Afghanistan, the U.S. in Lebanon and the U.S. in Iraq.)
Not only are the benefits of military action dubious, but the costs are higher than realized.
When President Johnson wanted to conceal and minimize the cost of his invasion of Vietnam, he had Social Security contributions and expenditures, which are paid for and disbursed entirely outside of the federal budget, placed for accounting purposes into the budget. There they remain, making the percent of military spending look relatively smaller.
Since transfer payments -- Social Security and Medicare etc. -- are self-financing and do not draw on the income tax-based general fund or contribute to the national debt, they can be excluded when tracking military expenditure as a proportion of total federal government expenditures. Using that approach, which was always used before President Johnson, military spending is over half of federal expenditures.
A number of economists maintain that our military-related spending is more than $1 trillion a year. Using the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, they add on 50 percent of the space budget, 80 percent of grants to foreign governments, veterans benefits, military medical payments, and the interest on the debt attributable to military expenditure, which is about 81 percent.
BGCs suffer from what columnist David Sirota calls Selective Deficit Disorder. A person suffers from this when they passionately oppose expanding the deficit to help ordinary people with something such as health care, yet show no concern for exploding deficits when proposals are made for tax cuts, violent Middle East social engineering, or giving hundreds of billions to bailout the thieving Wall Street firms.
The Democratic health care bill costs $849 billion over a decade -- less than our military-related expenditures for one year. As well, the annual cost of health care reform would be less than what we spend in our wars annually.
Thanks to the BGC perspective that the media conveys, few Americans are aware of this.
Jones lives in West Haven.
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