David Brooks' latest column represent the kind of facile thinking that is fueling voter fantasies about the "growth of government", and seems to suggest that state and federal employees are a new kind of "welfare queen". There are many logical fallacies with his argument. The most obvious is the idea that Democrats just want to "spend, spend, spend," while Republicans want to reduce spending. The last time the GOP was in the majority, they oversaw the largest expansion of Medicare since its inception with the Part D benefit, and they started a $3 trillion (according to Columbia University economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) war of choice, while cutting taxes and demanding no sacrifice for anyone who wasn't in the military. Meanwhile the last time this country didn't run a deficit, it was under President Clinton, a Democrat.
The real point of contention I have with Brooks' argument is the idea that the path to regaining control over budgets is to cut benefits and pay to employees. The idea that the massive transfer of taxpayer monies to private corporations in the form of agricultural subsidies, oil-company subsidies, and the Part D benefit, never seems to cross Mr. Brooks' mind. This suggests that he believes it is OK for private corporations to receive unlimited taxpayer largesse, but heaven forbid should an everyday middle class wage-earner derive a paycheck by working for it.
As Mr. Brooks alludes to, much of government spending in post-war America went towards things that created the greatest growth in opportunity our country has ever seen, from the GI Bill to the space program. The real problem in the decline of innovative programs is not greedy unions, but a lack of political will and leadership to innovate as one people and one country. Conservatives have used fear and greed to divide our country as never before, pouring gasoline on the fires of time-wasting and irrelevant issues to our nation. In addition they have pushed for deregulation and the promulgation of a value-draining economy based on speculative real estate deals and unregulated derivatives trading.
This translates to lack of cohesive national vision and the decline of government-induced innovation. It is an ideologically-driven assertion with no basis in fact to blame the decline of useful government programs on pensions. It is part of the conservative agenda to siphon ever more taxpayer money into Wall Street, and he alludes to one of the favorite hobby horses of conservatives: privatize the pension plans. Anyone who has had a 401(k) plan and an interest in retiring while still capable of self-ambulating can tell you about the effectiveness of this approach.
In addition, the largest political campaign contributions are coming from shadow organizations funded by the Koch brothers and other dubious private interests, and it is simply not true that unions spend more than any other entity.
I also wanted to point out that the growth of the prison-industrial complex is the direct result of the conservative obsession with punishment and incarceration as opposed to education and rehabilitation. If Mr. Brooks is so concerned about prison pension plans, he might consider the root cause of the growth of prisons is that they are a job creation program in rural areas in California, and that conservative voters enjoy the idea of punishing criminals far more than the idea of educating people before they become criminals in the first place. To his credit, he does point out that California pays more for prisons than for schools, but he seems to fail to connect the dots that conservatives like prisons while normal Americans would probably prefer to pay for schools.
