When Kansas lawmakers finished their budget work this year, leaving it in required balance without a tax increase, an analyst noticed that the poor will suffer most from the cuts. The same observation can be made of the cuts conservatives want to make in federal spending.
The poor and the old inevitably lose the most when government is cut back because they benefit most from government programs.
It is no accident that Medicare was designed to provide health care for over-65 Americans. Older people need more medical care. Retired people tend to be less able to pay for their own care. These two facts manifested themselves in millions of horror stories in the days before President Lyndon Johnson dreamed of a Great Society and persuaded Congress to create the Medicare program in 1966.
Cutting way back on Medicare in the name of economy, as the House-passed budget plan would do, would make life much more difficult for the old and the poor, which is why the Republican plan won’t — and certainly should not — become law.
Medicare became law 45 years ago because the American people thought it a good idea to take care of the old and the poor. The proposition that we are our brother’s keeper is sound social philosophy with a prestigious origin. The argument remains persuasive two thousand years later.
Because of the ways the state spends money, the Kansas budget cuts are spread across the board. Spending on public education was slashed again. All but families who home-school or send their children to private schools will be hurt directly. But the entire state will be diminished far into the future as the decision to make Kansas schools less able to meet global standards creates generations of Kansans less able to compete and succeed.
There also were discriminatory recisions made. Family planning clinics were stripped of funding to feed the anti-abortion obsession that eats at the conscience of the governor and many lawmakers. The effect, of course, will be to send those who can afford it to other states, to tempt some desperate girls and women into self-mutilation and to revive the back-alley abortion trade and its concomitant lethal infections which were largely responsible for Roe V. Wade. History does repeat itself.
THOSE REDUCTIONS in the kinds of government spending designed to lift the whole population up to a higher level are not required by economics. Americans in general and Kansans in particular are not over-taxed. Taxes in Kansas, for example, were reduced in the 1990s, both for businesses and individuals and have not been increased. At the federal level, the Bush tax cuts brought federal tax levels way down. The upper levels of the personal income tax today are about half what they were under President John F. Kennedy.
The popular notion that Americans are over-taxed grows primarily from incessant propaganda. It’s the big lie technique that the Nazis invented — say something often enough and loudly enough and it will be taken as fact.
It is important that Americans regain their perspective before anti-tax fever does irreparable damage to our society. In a country where the median wage of a chief executive officer of the top 200 corporations is more than $8 million a year and the incomes of the rich have been growing at more than 10 percent a year, those who say America can’t afford excellence in public education and a health care system which serves ALL of the ill and injured have a warped sense of what a democratic system of government should accomplish.
The purposes of popular — meaning all of the people — government are to achieve the well being of all of the people, in so much as that can be done. Those purposes can’t be accomplished without the apportionment of resources through government. America has the resources needed to meet the needs of all of its people. The challenge lies in straightening out our twisted notions of how those resources should be allocated to create the greatest good for the greatest number — a moral goal all governments of the people, by the people and for the people should put first in their catechisms.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
