The New Deal to The Old Steal

Unemployment is forcing me to move in with my girlfriend and her family in Ohio in December, but while I don't have a job, I have unemployment benefits. It's part of my personal connection to the much maligned "big government." Big government to me is also the food stamps my widowed mother briefly received after my father died and the free school lunches I received.

Things improved after my mother landed a temporary job funded through the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act, a now defunct federal government program tied to The New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. Later she landed a local government job in my hometown of New Haven, CT as a metermaid. It was a thankless job, but she was a member of the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees and received decent pay and benefits that allowed us to live relatively comfortable.

This was in in the 1970s during the administration of then President Jimmy Carter, remembered as the last truly liberal president. Actually, that title probably belongs to Lyndon Johnson, according to a new and excellent book I'm reading. Winner-Take-All Polititics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, dates the beginning of the dismantling of The New Deal to what I call The Old Steal to the Carter-era. It partially blames it on Carter and the Democrats - who had a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate - for their reluctance to support unions like the one my mother belonged to as well as private sector unions.

The book documents how the richest 1 percent earned about 8 percent of all income in the Carter era and now earn about 23.5 percent and how their income grew 256 percent during that time while the middle fifth of the country - working class folks like my mother - increased only about 20 percent. Much of this was due in the 1980s to President Ronald Reagan - Saint Reagan as he is now portrayed by reactionaries - who proudly proclaimed, "Government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem."

Never mind that Reagan exploded deficits and actually expanded the size of government. Reagan made demonizing government and making it seem bloated and inept the status quo for politicians. By 1996, centrist Democratic President Bill Clinton was declaring, "the era of big government is over." Fortunately for her, my mother was dead of cancer by then having gotten the kind of humane and enormously expensive hospice care in her last days that those 46 million of us without healthcare could never dream of these days.

As Hacker and Pierson detail, the American idea of rugged individualism that most Americans embrace is a myth. Even the pioneers benefitted from The US Army, the Lewis and Clark expedition and land grants. And corporations have suceeded thanks to government grants, innovation developed at public universities and both business-friendly tax laws and antiunion laws.

Contrary to what most Republican pols say and what most Americans foolishly buy into, big government isn't just bureaucrats enforcing pesky laws, but the people who enforce, or at least to occasionally enforce, workplace safety as well as clean air, food and water laws. It's cops, firefighters, postal workers and soldiers. Government is people and is supposed to be by the people and for the people as Lincoln said.

All that is ending now as what's left of the social safety net is shredded thanks to Republicans and mostly spineless Democrats like President Barack Obama AKA The Great Capitulator who won't even draw a line in the sand about letting tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of the year. Medicare and Social Security will likely be further diluted and possibly privatized in the coming years in one of the last remaining windfalls for Wall Street. The race to the bottom has turned a democracy into an oligarchy.

Meanwhile, my unemployment benefits expire in January when Republicans assume control of the House after their midterm landslide earlier this month. The odds of my finding another journalism job are the only thing higher than the odds on my benefits being renewed.