[PLUG-TALK] Scorecard on federal spending

[glen e. p. ropella]

Thus spake Rich Shepard circa 10-01-28 03:13 PM:
> On Thu, 28 Jan 2010, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> 
>> Which begs two questions: (1) Why do Republicans consider themselves the
>> more fiscally responsible party? And (2) how did Reagan become the poster
>> child of conservative budget policy?
> 
>    Some consultant sold them on this concept of the Big Lie. They repeated it
> often enough that they came to believe, and so did many others.

Well, I think it goes a little deeper than that.  Tax cuts appeal to the
narcissistic conservative, those people who think that conservatism
extends only as far as their own interests/influence.  So, regardless of
some abstract national debt or deficit that they are too self-centered
to spend much time thinking about, as long as they see their withholding
go down, their refund go up, a drop in taxes, even lower prices on
plastic crap from China, or big vats of mayonnaise at the Walmart,
they're happy.  And they call that "being conservative".

This is a personal extrapolation of the "externalize costs, internalize
profits" mentality.  Anyone who thinks at all deeply about the heavily
interconnected web of causality in which we live will understand that
the abstraction of "externalize costs, internalize profits" is what
causes the damage.  If you can get big vats of mayonnaise for pennies on
the dollar, then the costs for the creation and delivery of those vats
are most likely hidden from you... they don't just go away.  Often they
transform into other things (like large E. Coli vectors or landfills
full of plastic buckets).

Reagan became the poster child of conservatism because he catered to the
myopic morons who can't see their hand in front of their face, much less
extrapolate the impact of their actions decades into the future or
across the globe.

Of course, to be fair, we're all just tiny little specks of dirt with
finite minds.  And many of us (especially in rural areas) are just
scraping by with little time to devote to thinking about far flung lands
or the distant future.  So, it's easy to sympathize with those that
don't have the energy or resources to see their hands in front of their
faces.  To boot, many of these poor sods were reared to think that
education is for sissy twig-boys and the "salt of the earth" spends time
cutting brush on the ranch, not fishing through citations in the backs
of Science articles.  Add to that the fact that we all enjoy BEING
CORRECT or one-upping each other in arguments, so that when some
high-falutin' fancy talker like Milton Friedman or Friedrich von Hayek
gives you just enough ammo to shoot yourself in the head, you tend to do
just that.

The real question is:  Why did I take the time to write the above
drivel?  That's the confusing part. ;-)

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, http://ropella.net/~gepr