gracchusdixit

Republicans in Congress have just all but eliminated funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known once upon a time as “food stamps”.  This program helps more than 40 million Americans—the poor, the unemployed, thousands of disabled veterans as well as active servicemen and women—to buy food they otherwise could not afford.  To Republicans, however, it is just another give-away that encourages people to stay home, sit on the couch, and do nothing—another “entitlement” for the shiftless and the lazy that deserves to be eradicated.  Leading the fight for “entitlement reform” is Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose various “Ryan budgets” have tried (among other things) to abolish Medicaid, slash Medicare, and privatize Social Security.

It may surprise you to read in these pages that Paul Ryan is right:  “entitlement reform” is both needed and long overdue.  But alas, the most necessary reforms do not appear anywhere on the Congressman’s list.  For instance:

(1) The United States has nearly a thousand military installations here and abroad, far more than the British or Roman Empires when they ruled the world.  Since we are not an “empire,” or at least do not suppose ourselves to be, why do we need to pay for all this expensive real estate?  Many of these installations are little more than “entitlements” for the global corporations whose interests they protect or for the otherwise unemployable inhabitants of the largely “red states” in which they are located.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by shutting down every army, navy and air force base that doesn’t actually make the American people safer.  Apart from saving a great deal of money, their closure might have the salutary effect of causing the flag-waving citizens of the heavily “entitled” red states to think twice about the “evils” of government.

(2) We tolerate and subsidize the inefficiencies and cost over-runs of more than a hundred major corporations in the armaments, aviation, energy and “security” industries.  Former military officers and government officials, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, have long felt themselves “entitled” to employment by these corporations after leaving office, just as the corporations themselves feel “entitled” to feed at the public trough.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by canceling their bloated contracts.  Let’s go even further by demanding our money back.  Maybe the Chinese or the Koreans or even the French could do the work less expensively and more efficiently.

(3) We indemnify a handful of agribusiness conglomerates—Cargill, ADM, and others—against the risk of market and price fluctuations.  We put a floor under their crop prices.  We insure them against the vagaries of the weather.  We subsidize the price they pay for the water to irrigate their fields and charge them not a penny for dumping their swill in countless rivers and streams across the land.  In the spirit of true free enterprise, it is only reasonable to ask why such companies should be “entitled” to make money no matter what the markets and Mother Nature decree.  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by cutting them loose.  Let them compete, pay a fair price for the resources they consume, and take their knocks in the “free market” like everyone else.

(4) For a pittance, we allow major pharmaceutical companies to market the drugs discovered and formulated by the scientists at the National Institutes of Health, at the Center for Disease Control, and in the government-funded laboratories of countless major universities—which is where nearly all truly beneficial new drugs come from.  Why should drug companies be “entitled” to twenty or thirty percent profit margins at the public’s expense?  Let’s cut back this “entitlement” by keeping the patents on the government’s books.  Better yet, let’s sell the drugs, at cost, directly to the citizens who paid for their development in the first place.

(5) We lavishly subsidize the richest corporations on the planet—the big energy companies.  We let them drill on public land; we let them blow up mountains and tear down forests; we let them build pipelines that deface the earth, poison the water, and devastate whole communities.  We let them get away with unconscionable negligence and punish them with a slap on the wrist.  People like the infamous Koch brothers, whose incomprehensible wealth bankrolls the entitlement-hating tea party, are the beneficiaries of the biggest “entitlement program” in human history.  Let’s eliminate this “entitlement” altogether.  If energy companies want to drill and spill, let them do it on their own nickel.

(6)  To fund Social Security, we tax all Americans at the same “flat” rate, whether they make ten thousand dollars or ten million.  Even worse, we cap Social Security taxes, so that income over $113,000 a year doesn’t contribute to funding the program.   Worst of all, we distribute Social Security benefits to everyone, whether they need the money or not.  A friend of mine always chuckles when this subject comes up.  “My mother-in-law,” he once quipped sardonically, “uses her Social Security check to pay for a second country club membership.”

If Paul Ryan and the Republicans really want “entitlement reform,” perhaps they should start with the country club memberships.