"We Need to get Republican Leadership Out of Congress"
by Mike Cohen, Guest Author
Published in the South Marion Citizen, September 24, 1999
"It's your money," the Republicans keep telling me. "Make them give it back." Sure. Like those magazine hucksters luring me on with, "You may already be a winner!"
Well, you know what? I'm already not a winner. You know what else? It's not my money. It's not your money either; it's nobody's money because it's not real, it doesn't exist, it's nothing.
There is no surplus.
Five and a half trillion dollars, that's what's real. But hey, here's the bad news: It's like non-money. No matter what our Republican senators and representatives tell us, they've got it backwards. We don't have it, we owe it.
We owe it and we have to give it back. And the sooner the better because the interest on that debt is killing us, $250 billion a year every year. Tell that to our wannabe tax-cutters-for-the-rich in Congress.
Back in the '80's when Ronald Reagan was running the country from cue cards and cutting taxes with one hand and spending money like it wasn't his with the other, and you and I were younger and enjoying the free ride, the national debt went from millions to billions, from billions to trillions and we laughed like giddy idiots and wondered what he'd give us next, gazillions?
Enough, stop it; stop right there! Shame on me. How can any patriotic American fault Reagan? All that heavy spending went for war material, didn't it? It won the Cold War, didn't it? Trying to keep up with us, the Soviet Union matched our dollar expenditures with their ruble expenditures and nice guy Reagan called them an Evil Empire and backed up his taunting with more billions worth of military muscle.
So the Soviets matched out spending, rubies for dollars, until finally they ran out of rubies. And communism collapsed. And the Berlin Wall came down. And we were the winners and wasn't that great?
So here was the score: We had that awful debt, true, but on the other side, Soviet Communism was dead and whatever it had cost, wasn't it worth it? Could there have been a better scenario?
Well, here's your chance to call me a dove. Call me soft on communism. Get original and call me something really nasty - but I think our relations with Soviets could have been handled better. Ask any veteran of front line combat how he feels about the safe-at-home blowhard politician talking tough to a potential adversary.
Yes, I think we could have done without all that hostility. We could have raised our civility a notch and let our differences, guided by subtle diplomacy, compete in the marketplace of usefulness to mankind rather than with blustering threats and more nukes.
Dictatorial communism, in the long run, can't make it in a contest with democratic free enterprise. We could have lowered our voices, raised our patience and let the course of nature work things out. Ronald Reagan's horse opera bravado may have gratified the macho within our manly breasts but after the brawl, somebody has to sweep up the broken glass. That somebody, my fellow Americans, is us. So please let's look at the claim that Ronald Reagan's enormous deficit doesn't matter because we won the Cold War. Let's look at it again, because it's not true. Russia's economy is a shambles that's not good news, it's bad news; it's awful.
Because while the Soviets bankrupted themselves building all those nukes, their collapse left them with a tottering government, an empty treasury and only one cash-worthy asset: all those thousand of nuclear weapons Ronald Reagan forced them to build.
Who knows what shaky regime will be governing Russia tomorrow? Who knows what rogue nation or nations, what terrorists will bid high enough to tempt the rulers of the Kremlin to start selling off some of those nukes?
You have to gasp in awe at the hubris of the Republicans asserting that they won the Cold War while in truth the unintended by-product of that war, that Soviet weaponry, remains a deadly threat to American security.
You have to gasp, too, at Republicans' determination, now that this Democratic administration has stanched the bleeding, to give themselves a handout in disregard of the enormous backlog of debt remaining from the profligate Reagan years.
The 12 Reagan/Bush years cost us dearly in deficit spending and left us exposed to nuclear attack by whatever kooks might persuade a cash-hungry, unstable Russian leadership to do a little business. There's not much we can do about those Russian nukes, but we certainly can do something to restore our own fiscal soundness.
We can turn back the whiny Republicans and let their constituents pay a fair tax to help support the nation in which they have so fulsomely prospered.
"It's my money." Can you believe it? Is this the best the Republican Party has to offer?
We need no better proof than this that this country needs to get the Republican leadership
out of Congress, keep them out of the presidency and unite for the 21 century under
responsible Democratic leadership.
Mike Cohen
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