It's old news, really; the Greedy Old Party rails at welfare mothers all day long and insists we can't feed starving kids with SCHIP or pay emergency responders for saving lives in a terrorist attack, but the REAL sacred cow isn't the routinely assaulted Social Security or Medicare system, it's corporate welfare, which is never even considered when it's time for another round of budget cuts. Corporations have more rights and privileges than you or I but pay less taxes, as I've said many times only to hear fierce denial from people who live in denial. Expecting big business to contribute anything like the share of the tax burden they face in the many industrialized nations whose economies have been doing much better than ours for decades is un-American: Patriotism means imploding your nations economy, repeatedly. After all, supporting big business increases federal revenue by increasing coporate income taxes--even though US corporate income taxes are a pathetic joke and the industry lobbyists masquerading as politicians are constantly demanding they be lowered.

The bottom line is we've bought back into laissez-faire economics even though everyone else on the planet not only knows it doesn't work but can cite chapter and verse on its repeated and consistently catastrophic collapses (exhibit A is usually the global depression of the '30s that prompted desperate masses to elect genocidal maniacs promising nationalist glory but delivering the bloodiest war in history). Thirty years of moving to the right has resulted in deregulation, privatization, union busting, tax cuts etc. that brought America to her knees and sent most of her industry to China, yet the proposed solution is to move even FURTHER right (just a few weeks ago former House Majority Leader Dick Armey suggested axing Medicare because, according to him, most Americans have TOO MUCH health insurance). It's like a 60 pound heroin addict who smells like a landfill and has three teeth left but is CONVINCED that all he needs is a little more junk to put him right. At some point you either accept that you need to make some major changes or denial kills you. Perhaps the most ironic thing is that the big winner in the laissez-faire liquidation of America is "Red" China.

However, as long as people buy into the big lie that they're poor because Uncle Sam is taking too much of their taxes rather than because the "ownership society" basically means "you're on your own" nothing's going to change. Most individuals tax burden is primarily local rather than federal anyway, but until budgets get cut to the point that people start to see up close and personal just how much government actually does they won't value it, and will continue insisting we'll all be better off with lower taxes. As always, the first in line for those tax cuts will be the people (particularly the "people" who exist nowhere but on paper) who need them least. We've become convinced that the American Dream means "do whatever you have the power to do" and that's great if you're at the top of the food chain, but pretty awful if you're anywhere else.