Column: Jennifer Vogt-Erickson, My Point of View

With the new debt ceiling agreement, Medicare and other social spending are up for substantial trimming, while millionaires and billionaires are a protected species — radically protected. Most Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate have signed the Americans for Tax Reform Pledge to not raise any taxes, and they stuck to it. Some members use the rhetoric that it’s not fair to take out our deficit and debt problems on the backs of the rich. But somehow it’s better to take it out of Granny and Gramp’s backs instead? Is this really what we’ve come to?

Capitalism is an economic system, not a religion, but it’s difficult to tell the difference the way that some elected representatives cleave to the idea that unfettered capitalism will be our salvation. I guess if you’re already wealthy, that’s true. Capitalism starts to ride off the rails for most people, though, because it is very efficient at concentrating the wealth of the country into fewer and fewer hands. It’s one of the main rules of capitalism: those who have, get. Starting shortly after the industrial revolution in the 1800s, it became clear that government would have to exert a moderating influence on the dynamics of capitalism in order for it to be a sustainable system.

After the Stock Market Crash of 1929, government regulation became much stronger, and the major boom-bust cycles were smoothed out. Following the Great Depression and World War II, the United States reached a period of broader prosperity than at any other time in our history. The middle class blossomed.

Somehow the historical knowledge of the ugly side of capitalism is getting lost amid the rhetoric of how terribly restrictive and inefficient government supposedly is. Since the latest wave of conservatism started in the early 1980s, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor has returned to levels unseen since before the stock market crash of 1929.

Demand for goods is falling off because many households simply don’t have much buying power anymore. Some pretty startling figures were just released by the Pew Research Center: In 2009, 15 percent of white households, 31 percent of Hispanic households, and 35 percent of black households had zero or negative net worth. The housing bubble and easy credit in the early 2000s helped people keep spending even though they didn’t really have the money, but that’s all gone now.

What we need is good jobs, millions of them. The main Republican solution to the employment crisis is to give more tax breaks to the wealthy, because they are the so-called “job creators.” This argument is magical thinking — the statistics don’t support it, but yet it is repeated over and over like some kind of Biblical truth.

There were generous tax cuts for the wealthy during the Bush era, which have been extended, but the jobs didn’t appear. And they’re not going to, because there isn’t enough household demand from the vast midsection of America. The luxury goods market is booming, people like Stephen Schwartzman throw multi-million dollar birthday parties for themselves and Kim Kardashian’s wedding will surely be lavish, but that is not going to resuscitate our wider economy.

The only entity big enough to pull us out of this mess is the government, just like it eventually did in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929. It gave people jobs and dignity until the private sector got back on its feet. But what did the Tea Party-wagged Congress do during our current recession? It just spent a lot of time holding the debt ceiling extension hostage so that it could carve out money from social programs. The idea of more stimulus spending or extending the temporary payroll tax cut (which would help average working people the most) was off the table. In a downturn, though, it’s basic economics that the government needs to use its spending power to pump money back into the economy, putting it into the hands of people who turn around and spend it right away. The cuts Congress is doing instead leave most of the big Congressional campaign donors unscathed, but they sure hit a lot of people in the middle class on down. Those people aren’t as visible, though, and they don’t have deep pockets. They’re the ones who will share the sacrifice, not the wealthy.

So the question I pose to Tea Party members in Congress, many of whom are closely connected to the religious right (I’m thinking about Michele Bachmann in particular), is: what would Jesus want us to radically protect? The personal fortunes of the Koch brothers, who inherited $300 million each from their father, used it to build a $100 billion empire, and now help bankroll the Tea Party movement?

Surely they have received their consolation. Or would Jesus want us to protect people who are poor, elderly, sick or looking for work? The Tea Party members’ preferred choice so far is obvious. Make no mistake, Tea Party members are slavishly protecting the interests of the wealthy like nobody else, and they’re proudly emasculating government at a time when the rest of us need it the most. They will be emboldened to keep doing it unless regular people stop voting for this economic and moral nonsense.

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.