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REPUBLICANS: LOOK IN THE MIRROR
03/08/2009
I was on recession watch last week, waiting to hear from one of my sons whether or not he would be keeping his job. He company, as so many companies, is having to lay off workers. He is keeping his job for now, but the next round of cuts might include him. Another son's wife was laid off months ago.
My husband's company has just completed its third round of layoffs. For now, my husband is the one delivering the bad news to employees in his office, and it weighs heavily on him when he has to do so. The employees who remain, including my husband, have all taken a pay cut.
In the meantime, I am visiting assisted living facilities and nursing homes, looking for a place where my severely disabled father can live comfortably and affordably, now that my ailing mother can no longer care for him. When I first started looking, the facilities were all full. Now there are openings. I wonder if that means families have had to move their elderly and sick parents and grandparents in with them, even though they do not have the ability to care for them adequately, because they can no longer afford the 24 hour care these facilities offer, of if they have had to move them to less desirable, less costly facilities.
My daughter has enrolled all of her children, one after another, at a parent cooperative pre-school. Her youngest is now in her first year there and enrollment is down considerably compared to enrollment five years ago when she enrolled her first child there. Parent cooperative schools are much less expensive than private for-profit pre-schools, so I wonder if this means that some parents cannot even afford the less expensive pre-school. As for the parents who remain, including my daughter, keeping up with costs for the school means more fundraisers which take up a lot of her time.
I don't go to the grocery store as often as I used to. I am using up most things in my pantry and freezer before I make a trip, so we are having interesting meals, and when I do go I look at prices more closely than I used to. I am flabbergasted by how much things cost. The thing that surprises me more than the cost of food is the cost of necessary paper products. Have you checked out how much toilet paper costs lately? It's astonishing, especially when you consider where it ultimately ends up.
As for other shopping, I simply don't do it. The mall has become a foreign country to me, and the once mindless shopping for gadgets and household dιcor is over. I don't even watch HGTV any more as it only reminds me of what I cannot afford. And when it comes time to shop for a birthday or wedding present, I have to find a way to squeeze something out of my strained budget.
I remodeled my kitchen two years ago when times were good, and while it is lovely, it has not enhanced the value of my house. At the time I was in remodel hell, a realtor told me not to stress out too much as the inconvenience would be worth it. It would add fifty thousand dollars to the home's value, he told me, but that was when my home was appraised at double what it is today. Now the money I put into that remodel is worth exactly nothing. Were I to sell my home today, I would get no more for it than any of my neighbors who did not remodel their kitchens. So I might as well have flushed $50,000 down the toilet along with that ridiculously priced toilet paper.
Several years ago, when times were good, my husband and I decided to refinance our home from a thirty year loan to a fifteen year loan, which doubled the payment amount. As we were in our mid fifties at the time, we thought this was a smart move. We were making good money and we were following the example of both our parents who owned their homes outright, making retirement living much easier for them. Now, the much higher house payment is more of a burden. We wonder if we will be able to afford it should my husband's company continue layoffs. We went to our bank and tried to refinance back to a thirty year loan, thinking we probably won't stay here more than a few years anyway, but the bank says our home has lost too much in value and they can't refinance it for us. So we keep paying high payments and hope for the best.
I have just listed eight ways the recession has affected my family, and we are responsible people who still have a good income. Those who were less responsible, or less fortunate, are struggling much more. Today, the loss of a job means the loss of health insurance, and often the loss of one's home as new jobs are harder and harder to come by. This is why President Obama must address so many things at once, including the mortgage and health care crises.
We are witnessing, I fear, the beginning of a profound change in the American lifestyle. Middle class families can no longer assume that life will be comfortable, vacations routine, cars, clothes, furniture, televisions and computers updated regularly. No longer can we afford to shop for groceries without coupons and careful attention to the price of everything. Meals at restaurants will be a luxury and college educations will be unaffordable for many. Without real health care reform, many people will suffer with diseases that could once be treated with good medicine.
All of this is the result of supply side (or "trickle down") economics, started by Ronald Reagan and favored by conservatives, as well as the greed and recklessness that was enabled by the Republicans' refusal to enact good regulation of the banking, mortgage and securities industries. All of this, in other words, can be laid at the feet of the Republican Party and some Democrats who cooperated with them.
And yet, the people who are so angry today are largely the Republicans. Whenever I talk to a Republican in my family, at the store, in the neighborhood it is the same. They cannot talk about the new president or his policies or the last election without sounding enraged. Like their bloated leader Rush Limbaugh, they call him a "socialist" or even a "Marxist." Republican legislators and talk show dunces want Obama to fail and they blame him for not yet cleaning up the mess created by their radical free market ideology.
Frankly, I don't understand their anger. Sure, it sucks to lose an election we Democrats are familiar with losing elections but the degree of the rage directed at the newly elected Democratic president is frightening.
Instead of offering ideas, when President Obama asks for them in a spirit of bipartisanship, or trying to be part of the solution, Republicans are playing politics, filibustering spending bills and suggesting all government spending be stopped (in a time of recession, economists say this is idiocy). In addition, they are refusing to confirm many of Obama's economic team, openly admitting this is "payback" for the Democrats not wanting to confirm some conservative appointments under Bush.
The Republicans, it seems, are having a little temper tantrum, refusing to take their medicine, refusing to say "sorry" for nearly destroying our economy, refusing to play nice. They care about nothing but the future of their party, which is in free fall towards total irrelevance, and so they whine and cry and call names and demand attention from the media.
They can't win with ideas, because they have none.
They can't win by being popular with the people, because they aren't.
They can't win by being the ones in power, so they misbehave in an effort to distract those who have power.
And in the meantime they do their best to prevent those in power from enacting the programs that might get us out of this mess simply because those policies might work, and if they work, the GOP and their failed policies might cease to be.
So I understand they are frustrated and are having temper tantrums, because they must use negative tactics just to get attention and stay in view. However, I don't understand the passion with which they express their anger.
The people who should be enraged are ordinary people like my husband and I. We are the ones who will be affected for the rest of our lives. We are the ones who won't be able to retire when we wanted to.
We are also the ones who wanted to prevent this. We believed in regulation, and a place for responsible government when these jokers were insisting the radical free market could be trusted, even as their buddies on Wall Street were robbing us blind.
We are the ones who believed war was not the answer when Bush marched our military into a country that hadn't attacked us and spent over a trillion dollars on his mad adventure.
We are the ones who insisted health care needed reform, and greedy insurance and pharmaceutical companies were standing in the way of a healthy nation.
We are the ones who wanted to play it safe, who issued warnings about the lack of regulation, the inflated home prices, the loans that should never have been given, the hedge funds that gambled with our future.
We are the ones who have endured three Republican recessions. Three times, under three Republican presidents, the economy went south, the housing market suffered, and my husband's civil engineering company, which depends on building and development to survive, had to make layoffs and apply pay cuts.
We're the ones who should be angry, because the things that are hurting us today, unlike natural disasters that kill thousands of human beings each year, didn't have to happen.
This recession/depression could have been avoided. If the people in the banks and on Wall Street had been reasonable rather than enormously reckless and greedy, or if government had regulations in place that would have limited their ability to be reckless and greedy, we might have had a small recession, but we would not be in the mess we are in today.
Republicans have said for years that we can trust people not to be reckless and greedy the market is so perfect that it will punish people for recklessness. In one sense, they were right. Many of the top earners who caused this mess have lost money, and many banks and securities companies may no longer exist three years from now. But the economy is so complex and everyone's money so interconnected that the people who are hurt the most are those who did nothing to cause the mess. And that is why regulation is essential to protect the innocent.
Nearly every economist today says government is the only entity powerful enough to rescue us from this mess. And many Republicans who are not Rush's dittoheads agree. We must have massive infusions of taxpayer money into the economy so the taxpayers don't suffer even more we might call it blackmail money. But at this point we have no choice. If we want the economy to survive, if we want to avoid a bigger disaster, we have to pay the ransom to the banks and financial institutions whose failure would mean even more hardship for us all.
How much easier it would have been to recognize years ago that government is also the only entity powerful enough to keep corporate America from destroying the economy by imposing reasonable but tough regulations on its activities.
Yet, even as Rush Limbaugh calls Obama a socialist, in an effort to bring him down, we know that Limbaugh and other Republicans have no other answers. They, too, know that we will not recover without federal money. What they refuse to admit is that they are the ones who caused this by their insistence on trickle down economics, redistributing wealth upwards, and refusing to keep an eye on those who were behaving recklessly and criminally.
Today, Rush is leading the charge to foment anger and hate and blame Democrats for the mess we are in. Barack Obama has been in office 7 weeks, and somehow the economy, according to his opponents, is all his fault. Never mind George W. Bush's trillion dollar boondoggle in Iraq, his massive spending bills, his deregulation and his TARP bill which took 700 billion dollars and disappeared it down the memory hole.
If Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans really want to know whose fault this failed economy is, they need only look in the mirror.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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