Bring on the pain.
Let Chicago’s public schools stay closed next fall. Let the buses stop running. Let Amtrak go out of business, along with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Purge the Social Security rolls of handicapped children and the welfare roster of mothers under 18.
Put prayer in the public schools and take out the hot lunches.
Stop Medicaid payments to spent-down grandparents in nursing homes. Strip the drug rehab money from last year’s crime bill, along with the ban on assault weapons.
And then, after Americans get a taste of life under the new regime, conduct another election.
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That’s what I’ve been telling my liberal-minded friends of late.
They don’t agree with me. You probably don’t either.
My friend the economic correspondent, an astute and well-traveled fellow, says it is the duty of the opposition to oppose. He argues that the Democratic minority in Congress must use every means available to stop the Republicans from enacting their “Contract with America.”
Another friend, a political consultant, says glumly that the cutbacks will pass no matter what Democrats do, and that they will remain in effect for decades because this is what the majority of Americans want.
My friend the community organizer, who has seen what a little federal pump-priming can do for a city neighborhood, says writers like me should try to dissuade Congress from pulling the plug on community-development funds.
I respect those opinions, but my liberal-minded friends-not having grown up in DuPage County-are, as is often the case in matters involving public sentiment west of Harlem Avenue, dead wrong.
The only thing that will restore public support for government efforts to improve the lot of poor and working-class Americans-the kind of support that enabled Franklin Roosevelt to launch the New Deal in 1933-is a sharp dose of widespread pain.
It may take a year. It may take four. But it’s the only way to change people’s minds.
In the meantime, there’s no point arguing that welfare needs to be improved rather than wiped out. Or that it’s a good idea to have train service between Chicago and Milwaukee; that job training is better than jail building; or that the federal budget deficit is equal to less than 4 percent of our economic output.
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You can’t argue with a bumper sticker. Or with middle-class Americans whose anxiety about the future-fed perhaps by stagnant wages, indiscriminate layoffs and violence on TV-is being directed at illegal immigrants, welfare cheats and repeat offenders. There is no competing with Sen. Phil Gramm’s oft-repeated applause line: “It’s time for people riding in the wagon to get off and help push.”
Only hard experience will demonstrate that all of us, to one extent or another, are inside that wagon.
It shouldn’t take long, after the balanced-budget amendment is ratified and the necessary cuts are made, for the public to find out how little (less than 3 percent) of federal spending pays for what most consider “welfare.” Or how much (nearly 60 percent) goes for Social Security, Medicare and defense.
At some point, after ma’s nursing-home bed goes “private pay” or daughter’s student loan gets canceled, a lot of $50,000-a-year libertarians who voted with Rush Limbaugh last Nov. 8 will get the wakeup call.
Until that happens, appeals to common sense or compassion are a waste of time. Better to register one’s objection and stand aside. That way the budget-slashers, who run for office better as outsiders, can’t accuse liberals of obstructing their plan.
In other words, bring on the pain.
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Three years ago this column scolded then-President George Bush for bad-mouthing worthwhile agricultural research in his State of the Union address. I speculated that a lazy speechwriter plucked “Belgian endive research” off a list of ridiculous-sounding federal grants published by the conservative (and tax-exempt) Heritage Foundation.
Sure enough, President Clinton, ever the me-too New Democrat, took the same bait Tuesday night. Clinton’s example of pork was “plant stress,” a reference to a $1.1 million grant made last year to Texas Tech University. The item appeared a few weeks ago on a pork hit list published by another conservative (and tax-exempt) outfit, the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Anyhow, I called Robert Albin at Texas Tech’s Plant Stress Institute in Lubbock. He explained that plant stress has nothing to do with neurotic nectarines or anxious asparagus. The institute does basic genetic research-the kind seed companies don’t do-laying the groundwork for new strains of wheat, corn, cotton and sorghum that can stand up to extreme temperatures and lack of moisture.
With serious water shortages looming in the plains states, some people think this is important.
Funny how the more you know about something, the less ridiculous it sounds.