Budget Cuts: Welfare vs. the War Machine, Time to Cut Where It Counts

New York Times' Op-Ed Columnist Bob Herbert has the right idea but the wrong perspective. In his article "The Human Cost of Budget Cutting", he states the U.S. government needs to stop cutting the much needed aid to human services but assumes America will agree that helping people is the right thing to do and doesn't give the alternatives for those cuts. It just so happens that an alternative to those cuts are given in the same paper by the New York times editorial "The Cuts the Pentagon Missed," suggesting the answer lay in cutting down on military spending. Even so, these two media stories combined still only hint at the severity of the corrupt aspects of government. Neither goes far enough to spell out what should be obvious to the casual observer using a small bit of logic combined with some good old common sense.

Bob Herbert goes over the same old song and dance by laying out the sad story of poor, old, and disabled people not being able to get the assistance they need. These cut backs carve out the tragedies of grandmas losing their homes and mothers unable to feed their children. Unfortunately the truth is, even though it might make most people feel sad, the majority of people don't care enough to do anything about it and think it should be someone else's problem. Welfare has been painted as the enemy of a thriving economy by the media. In America the consensus has become if you lend a hand, you create a dependent, helping people is actually hurting people, at their heart these people are lazy and unless by neglecting to provide basic human needs, thereby forcing them to participate in the economy, they will drain the system dry like insatiable leaches. 

Somehow, even with all the cut backs with the tragedies that they bring to the bottom rungs of society, the American government still seems to have a bottomless pocket book when it comes to spending on our National Defense. This is only possible by some form of public consent in this republican form of government. By convincing the public through inciting mass fear, through the corporately owned media, this consent has been made possible. 

When people are afraid they are easy to manipulate, making those able to direct the media the most powerful people in our nation. Having regular and broken cycles of war have clear benefits to those who wield that power, some being: the justification for those with power to remain in and exercise that power, temporary boosts in the economy to temporary relieve the unbalanced unsustainable consumption of resources, maintaining the illusion of a strong national identity, granting the ease to bend popular will to private interests, and most importantly, large profit and opportunity for these corporations by exploiting the warred upon country, all this at the cost of uncountable lives foreign and domestic. No matter how it is spun, it always seems to add up the same, the benefits of the few at the cost of the many, with all those costs maintaining the exalted position of a minority at the sacrifice of multitude.

 

 Annual spending on military budgets of the top five countries

 

 

Spending on National Defense is especially pointless, considering we already have military expenditures more than six times the next largest country (China). It would appear that at the rate we are building, America will soon have a war machine set and ready to take over the globe.

Contrary to popular opinion, Bob gives examples of how spending on welfare has paid off and been effective at stimulating the economy, "Community action agencies received $5 billion in stimulus funds to train people to weatherize homes. They ended up being ranked eighth out of 200 federal programs that got stimulus money in terms of the number of jobs created." What the media refuses to admit is that welfare, when organized correctly, is a win-win solution for a suffering economy and to those in economic destitute. The argument of big government (meaning welfare, regulation, or anything that puts limits on corporate power) is wasteful, is inconsequential to whether a government has good leadership and its programs are organized and thoughtfully executed. When welfare is structured appropriately, the guaranteed results will be an overall boon to society. Government, because of taxation, has the ability to do what no profit motivated enterprise can do, which is operate from the big picture, outside the scope of greed and create a better society for an entire citizenry.

These policies of continuing to cut human services while racing ourselves to build bigger better weapons are what's hurting America. Considering the issues of the times, people should be pulling together, building communities, spending money trying to solve the looming environmental and energy crises; but instead, individuals are becoming increasingly isolated and feeling more effectual at making a difference in the world. The government should be reaching out to help countries, lifting them out of poverty, thereby building strong social capitol, not spending hundreds of billions on the F-22 fighter jet, not promoting policies that allow powerful lobbying corporations to rob foreign countries of their natural resources in the aftermath of needless wars.

For every job opened up there are still 5.4 unemployeed workers that could fill it.

While the recession in 2009 ended with over 4 million jobs cut from the economy, it is the beginning of 2011 and unemployment is still encroaching on record levels. With free trade and the United States wholeheartedly opening itself up to the global market economy, these jobs that have been cut are not coming back. In this global free market economy you can now hire phone tech support in India for as little as 1$ an hour and pay a manufacturing worker in third world countries for as little as $.26 an hour. Under a global free market economy system, large corporations simply lack the incentive to invest in the U.S. labor force and are pulling their billion dollar industries out of our country. It is as if the heart of the industries that supported the American middle class for a hundred years have been sold out in dark back alleys by the super rich to virtual slave labor outside our borders.

President Obama has claimed in his state of the union address that America needs to, again, reinvent itself. That America must rise to the occasion to train for the jobs and industries of the future by embracing new technologies and build our economies around them; but America is already losing the race in creating the next generation of innovation with a 24th in ranking out of the 27 industrialized nations in graduation rates. Even though Obama may talk big about changes, he is powerless in his position of government to actually make the changes needed to reverse this trend in abysmally low national education standards. Only the states and local governments have the ability to make the changes necessary in education, but without an influx of large amounts of funding and with strong and immediate incentives to spend it effectively, the crisis in public education will enviably take the back seat--as it always has--to the more immediate needs of the States' base of local voters composed disproportionately of the rich and the elderly.

It is clear America's laissez-faire approach to economic governance is lacking in its ability to effectively deal with the economic crisis bearing down upon our nation, especially if the answer to future stability is thought to lie in better education. If this is the case--as logic surely dictates that it is--one can only hope the entire public will become aware enough, soon enough, to starting voting locally, electing local and state representatives that have foresight, that care about the general well being of the population to make changes for the greater good. Because now, with the all rich corporations--Americans gave birth to, nurtured, and put their faith in--bailing out on this nation, and without the entire nation taking drastic measures in educational reform with the utmost urgency, this generation will bear witness to what was once the greatest country, the one that championed capitalism to begin with, become just one more of the world's countries made third-world, sucked dry by the inherent exploitation of the for profit machinery we created.