The Republican/Tea Party Economic Plan

Tea Party Republicans were elected in large numbers in November 2010 with the promise of Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. The economy was struggling; while there had been constant private sector growth, that growth was slow and uncertain, and unemployment remained unacceptably high. A "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" platform was a vote-getter, even though the GOP were extremely vague about where these jobs were to come from. Rather than proposing anything concrete at all, their proposals were along the lines of: We will cut taxes on corporations and the rich, thereby unleashing a dynamo of job creation and prosperity for all as the wealth trickles down.

If that policy had worked, the economy would have boomed for the last 30 years and George W. Bush would have presided over the greatest job-creation period in history. Instead, it was one of the worst job-creation periods in history, culminating in the most savage economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The newly elected Tea Partiers took office in January. By now, any kind of job-creation effort has dropped off the radar screen. When out of power, the Republican strategy had been to be The Party Of No. Newly resurgent in the House, they have become The Party Of Cut, Cut, Cut -- but only in the right places! Nothing that would hurt them or their wealthy friends!

Here are the basics of the Tea Party Republican economic plan.

• Cut taxes on corporations and the rich. Repeal the estate tax. Cut taxes on capital gains and dividends. If it's a vote-getter to advocate tax cuts for even "the little people," as Leona Helmsley called them, then sure, why not? "Tax Cuts For All" will probably appeal to those voters who are struggling around the poverty line. But the truth is that the Republicans simply don't care about cutting taxes for waitresses and Wal-Mart clerks; the amount of money in question is not worth quibbling about. Corporations and the rich: That's where the billions are. And that's what they want to get their hands on for themselves and their greedy friends.

• Cut government oversight and regulation of private industry. Eliminate agencies like the EPA that hamper corporate profits. Workplace safety enforced at places like mines, offshore oil rigs, and meatpacking plants? Inspection of food production facilities by the FDA? Child labor laws, which are being relaxed in Maine? Cuts to community development grants, food aid to low-income pregnant women and their children, and grants to community action agencies that serve the poor? Regulatory authorities are bloated bureaucracies whose reason for existence is to enforce oppressive rules by an intrusive nanny state. Their very existence is an affront to the principles of the free market: salaries for make-work government jobs for bureaucrats who throttle industrial competitiveness.
  

• Cut social spending. Social spending, by definition, goes to people who can't afford to look after themselves (or even worse, to people who can afford it but who choose instead to freeload on the bushels of money the government shovels out to one and all). Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps for the poor, school lunch programs, Pell grants to help low-income youth attend college -- all of these are socialist handouts to the unproductive and therefore undeserving. Abolish FEMA and let people care for themselves, as they should in a free society. Starve K-12 public education while increasing funding to private, for-profit schools where the affluent can send their children, thus consolidating their privileged position in the world, while public schools sink ever lower into poverty and chaos and despair. Block funding to NPR and Planned Parenthood.

• Break the unions. End regulation of overtime pay and conditions. Abolish the minimum wage. Let people truly compete for work in a truly free market; a man who has a job and doesn't like the pay or conditions can leave, and those who have no job at all will be lining up to take his place. There are 112,000 teachers and 212,000 millionaires in New Jersey, but it's those greedy teachers with their $50,000 a year salaries and gold-plated pension plans who are bankrupting the state. Boeing's record profits are not enough: They must punish their recalcitrant workers in Washington, who had the temerity to demand decent wages and working conditions, and violate their contractual agreement with those workers by moving a major Dreamliner production line to South Carolina where they can pay non-union wages and -- surprise! -- receive big subsidies from the state government.

• Subsidize big industry. While government subsidies to the poor and struggling are out of the question, subsidies to the obscenely rich and powerful are another matter entirely. Billions in subsidies to oil companies, King Coal, huge factory farms and ethanol producers, Big Pharma patents to keep cheap generics and imported drugs off the market, and of course the biggest of all -- the War Machine -- well, subsidizing the rich so they can remain rich and get richer is taken for granted; cuts in these areas are unthinkable.

• Support Wall Street and the mega-banks to the hilt. Yes, their greed and irresponsibility plunged us into this situation where the taxpayers had to put the country in hock for decades to bail them out; and yes, the Frank-Dodd legislation, designed to prevent such situations in the future, was so watered down it achieves very little; and yes, they are in a position even stronger and more dominant than ever; and yes, exotic derivatives remain unregulated; and yes, they are paying record bonuses while Main Street is struggling to tread water -- and yes, they are our biggest campaign donors, but no, we will not accept any significant limitation on the overwhelming financial clout they wield and which can help us continue to be re-elected. A pox on Elizabeth Warren and her new agency! We are unalterably opposed to a bureau that protects financial consumers, because that would protect them (at least to some extent) from the depredations of Wall Street and the mega-banks.

What economic legislation has the Republican House passed or proposed that has not sought to achieve those ends I've mentioned?

Then there's their cultural and social policy:

• Repression of women's rights to reproductive freedom;
• Denial of science, to be replaced with good old-fashioned Christian faith;
• Indoctrination of children by manipulation of school text-book material to reflect a Christian, conservative slant;
• Infiltration of higher education by such as the Koch brothers, who donate millions to universities in return for vetting professors and setting curricula;
• Demonization of illegal immigrants, yet looking away when those same hardworking decent people care for their kids, clean their swimming pools, tend their gardens, and perform exhausting, soul-destroying labor in their fields and factories in unregulated conditions for less than minimum wage with no workplace rights or protections;
• Denial of basic human rights to those they deem to be "other" -- that is, anyone who is not white, Christian, and heterosexual.

"Take our country back" indeed: back to a time when White was Right and the rich ruled without restriction.