Tired of being "trickled upon"?

A not too long essay concluding with ‘being trickled upon’.

When I registered to vote way back in 1951, I registered Republican.  Joe McCarthy was at the height of his career, the Republican Party was the party of civil rights, and there was no way I wanted to be a party to a Party of either Joe or poll taxes.  In fact, I had the first bumper sticker with “Joe Must Go” at the University of California, Davis, and a few years later while living in Nevada, were among some of the last Americans to pay a poll tax.  I’m not sure why my husband had registered Republican, but there we were.  A conservative in the 1950’s, however, bears absolutely no resemblance to a conservative of 2012!

We were still registered Republicans when Bill had the opportunity to retire early under President Carter’s “reduction in force” efforts, so we moved back home to Cambria in 1979.  Along about that time we received a questionnaire in the mail from the Republican Party with a 100 or more questions about the direction we would like the party to go.  I happily went through the entire questionnaire, answering the best I could, and so pleased that someone actually cared what I thought, and would take my answers seriously. 

Thus, when Ronald Reagan began his campaign, I was pleasantly surprised that he was campaigning on those issues I thought were really important.  Imagine my absolute disgust some years later when I learned that the Republicans had compiled all of the probably millions of answers into a campaign platform for the public, but that they had no intention of actually following it. 

We had the introduction into American politics of Madison Avenue advertising techniques.  “The women want a whiter wash?  Rename the product “Rinso White”, even though it won’t get the clothes any whiter than it did before”.  And for kicks, add, “Whiter clothes with no sneezy soap dust”.  Say what you think people want to hear.  Even if they didn’t know they wanted to hear it, say it over, and over, and over, and over everywhere that you can, and pretty soon people begin to think that everyone else believes it, so something must be wrong with you.

When Reagan was elected after duping idiots like we were in our younger years, he began a program of destroying unions, denigrating social programs such as welfare, social security, and Medicare, and deregulating business.  When he got away with breaking the Air Traffic Controllers Union strike with no repercussions, unions began losing membership since they were no longer the protection against predatory business practices they had been.  Unions, Democrats and social justice programs became the demons.  His famous, “The nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”, along with, “Government is not the solution.  Government is the problem” became the mantra.  A lot of people have forgotten that Reagan made a deal with Iran to sell them arms, supposedly for the release of American hostages, which coincidentally occurred the day Reagan was inaugurated!  All of this was supposed to be hush-hush.  There were other nasty ramifications to this affair, but are too much to go into here.  The release of the hostages on that day began my awakening to how really awful Reagan had been. 

In the 1980’s, the radical religious right, mostly Protestant but some Catholics as well, began the push among their adherents that Democrats and Liberals were trying to replace God with Government.  That somehow helping a bed-ridden person get help; seeing to it that a senior with no family had a decent standard of living and medical care; that a young mother abandoned by her husband or boyfriend should not receive help or ‘food stamps’ and should instead rely on God to provide became a tenet of belief.  At first most of us thought this was simply a fad and would go away because it was almost too ridiculous to believe. 

Perhaps one of the most troublesome aspects of this program has been the complicity of the media.  We used to have real journalists like Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Huntley and Brinkley, and my all time favorite, Edward R. Murrow, who took on Joe McCarthy.  These were journalists who presented the news, and if there were two sides to the news, would explain why one side was right and the other wrong, or at least which was the stronger argument and which the weaker. We never knew what political party they belonged to, but we knew we could trust what they said.  What I think is wrong with the media now can be the subject of another blog.

We have this parroting from the radical right about not wanting to tax the job creators, because the country is in such a bad condition.  Well, it wasn’t in a bad condition until Reagan began the downward slide into economic chaos and George W. Bush finished it off.  Be that as it may, on the other hand we have Democrats lamenting that our country’s infrastructure is in really bad need of repair, and if we raised taxes we could fund the repair. 

But no one has put these two things together in what to me is a really obvious solution.  If the supposed job creators who make over $250,000.00 net income per year paid a progressive tax rate starting at a 5% increase with the $250,000.00, and going up 5% with every $50,000.00, the federal government would have sufficient funds to repair every road, every bridge, every public building including school buildings, and help states, cities, counties and special districts provide for the basic services that people need such as first responders, teachers, water systems, good sewer systems, roads, safe bridges, and still have funding for accountants and overseers of these funds to insure that the tax dollars are spent efficiently and economically.  And to make sure with strict enforcement and punishment that overt and covert corruption does not take place.  We have had enough of $700.00 hammers and the like.

Reagan had the economic theory called ‘trickle down economics’.  Making sure the people at the top had loads of money would then cause them to do all sorts of business things, and that money would ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us.  Well, for my part, I have been ‘trickled upon’ long enough.  When one is economically thirsty, a trickle simply doesn’t hack it.  We need a good long drink, and if you vote for any Republican this year, you must be happy with your ‘mere trickle’.