Class Warfare

For years we heard the Republicans explain that President Clinton was passing balanced budgets because there was a Republican Congress. However, now that there is a GOP dominated government – White House, Congress and Supreme Court – we see the most fiscally irresponsible government this nation has had in generations. Their actions show that the balanced budgets of the 1990s was due solely to the Democratic leadership of President Clinton and had nothing to do with a Republican Congress.

In 1993, President Clinton passed an economic package by a single vote in the Senate, which was cast by Vice President Gore. From that point on, the government was on a defined economic plan that over the course of five years resulted in balance budgets being submitted to the Congress and budget surpluses being established. The fiscal discipline extended to President Clinton vetoing irresponsible bills such as the repeal the Estate Tax. President Clinton vetoed the bill after it was delivered to the White House by a farmer on a tractor. The GOP argued that it is the farmers and small business owners who were hurt by the Estate Tax, yet despite this argument neither the farming lobby nor the GOP could show one farmer who lost his farm due to the tax. It was just a give away to the rich, and President Clinton did the responsible thing by vetoing it.

In contrast the House of Representatives, among other things, passed a $50 billion spending cut package. The spending cuts include reducing funding for food stamps, student loan subsidies, farmer subsidies, child care assistance, and medicare funding. The Senate passed a $60 billion tax cut package, most of these tax cuts were for the nation’s wealthy. These bills as a whole required the poor and middle class to sacrifice their well-being for the sole benefit of the rich. Ultimately, it will be the poor and middle-class who will have to pay the large deficits that will result since the rich are on track to pay no taxes whatsoever.

The biggest disappointment with these actions is that it was the government that created the middle class, and now it is the government that is going to destroy the middle class. After World War II, the GI Bill was created. Tens of thousands of soldiers where able to go to school when they returned from Europe and the Pacific. Also, the government created programs for veterans to obtain affordable mortgages so they could purchase their first homes. Through programs like these, the vets became the first solid middle class this nation had ever had.

Since WW II, the middle class has relied upon the government to allow it to continue to exist. Access to college through student loans, PELL grants and other financing mechanisms has allowed the middle class to send their children to college. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been integral in ensuring that interest rates would consistently be low enough and stable enough for the middle class to get mortgages, and the one tax shelter the middle class has access to is the tax deduction for mortgage interest - this is a tax deduction that a panel has recommended having removed from the tax code because it gives too much money to too many people.

All of this assistance will soon be gone due to the GOP’s actions. When the assistance disappears so will the core of the middle class. Additionally, there will be unsustainable deficits left in their wake and those who used to make up the middle class will have the burden of paying off the deficits which destroyed their livelihoods in the first place. Ultimately, there will not be enough money to reduce the debt; therefore, there will not be enough money to reestablish the middle class either. If the GOP is left in control of the government, the only ones who will suffer will be those who once thought they were living a comfortable life.