The Republican Way of Wrecking Government

Today, the recently elected Republican governor of New Jersey, Christopher Christie, announced a new budget for his state that proposes to close an $11 billion deficit exclusively by cutting services while making no attempt to raise revenue through increased taxes. His plan includes an $820 million cut in aid to schools.

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of smaller government that lives within its means,” Christie said.

Could there be a better illustration of the Republican strategy? It goes like this:

A. In times of plenty, cut tax rates to absurdly low levels. Fix it so that the cuts lopsidedly favor corporations and wealthy individuals while simultaneously mouthing populist rhetoric about letting the working man hold on to his hard-earned dollar. No one will complain—yet—because as long as the economy remains strong, so will revenues, and demand for government services will remain relatively slight.

B. When economic growth slows and government revenue declines and state and Federal deficits balloon, as predictably they will, begin to intone righteously about “spendthrift government” and “tax-and-spend liberals” and to call for “government that lives within its means.”

C. Use every ounce of political power you can accrue—such as the governorship of the state of New Jersey—to cut the government down to as close to nothing as you can take it, all on the premise that you’ve been left with no choice by the spendthrift liberals who proceeded you.

What do you call it when a man would cut close to a billion dollars of funding for the education of the children of his state and yet won’t lift a finger to raise additional, existing revenue from the numerous billionaires and giant corporations that make their homes within his jurisdiction? I have a word for it: EVIL.

You want to talk about “death panels”? How many more kids in Newark or Camden or Atlantic City will die young of drugs, AIDS or gunshot wounds because Christie can’t find it within himself to tap Merck or American Cyanimid for an extra few hundred million dollars? It isn't like they haven't got it. The economy is growing again, right? Wealth is being created in New Jersey. Do businesses in the Garden State not think that they have an interest in seeing to it that the state's young receive a decent education? Do they think life will be better for their employees if New Jersey's streets are crowded with homeless schizophrenics who can no longer receive treatment at shuttered psychiatric clinics and hospitals?

I lived in Namibia for a time. Namibia has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in Africa, but it also has one of the most unequal wealth distributions of any country in the world. One can live in first-world luxury in Windhoek, the capital. There are plenty of Mercs and Land Rovers on the road. You can work out on the StairMaster at a Virgin health club which is attached to a shopping mall that rivals anything in suburban America. But across the street from the health club is a public high school that is in a state of total decay. School employees and boarding students live in unheated cinderblock dorms surrounded by shards of shattered glass from the windows, most of which have long since been broken. Few can afford the pay-as-you-go electricity and so cook their meals over fires of scrap wood. Weeds grow up through the basketball courts and a layer of dust coats every surface in the classrooms which are empty except for a collection of broken-down old desks dating from the 1970s. Further down the road, along the edge of town the numerous poor live in windowless boxes made of corrugated steel. Streams of raw sewage run down the hillsides, and these unfortunate people—who constitute a majority of Namibia’s population—are dying by the truckload of HIV and TB, so much so as to give Namibia one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

I'd like to ask Governor Christie what his model is for America’s future? I know he doesn’t take anyplace like Sweden or even Germany for a model. Those places are too “socialist.” But would he adopt Namibia as a model for America’s future? I doubt it. At least he wouldn’t admit as much. And yet, when you get behind the moralistic rhetoric of self-reliance, this is exactly what Christie and other Republicans are calling for, a country where the rich cling to every last dollar they can get their hands on and step across the prostrate bodies of the poor, the uneducated and the lame while they, the little kings and queens, make their way to their next gala ball. In other words, he wants America to be like Namibia.