By Gordon Bowie, Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee
When his children were toddlers, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise must have been a mesmerizing father at bedtime. He surely told his kids of wondrous fairy tales, magical lands and scary demons, based on his ability to tell tales totally unrooted from reality. He continued to spin yarns Nov. 18 in The Advocate and NOLA.com, with almost 700 words devoted to a fantasyland where all good Republicans are heroes.
Without evidence, Mr. Scalise links the rise in inflation to what he calls a $4.5 trillion bill but fails to explain what mystery bill he is referring to, or when it passed. He also fails to mention that 60 percent of the largest corporations in America are reporting increased profits -- many at record levels -- and that they are taking advantage of the pent-up consumer demand to raise prices as the pandemic slows and the supply line is challenged. He fails to mention how the inflation rate is partly due to a military budget — which he repeatedly increased — that over the next decade is five times the combined cost of the two major Biden infrastructure bills.
Mr. Scalise conjures this: “The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that this socialist tax-and-spending spree will add $3 trillion to the national debt when you remove the Democrats’ misleading budget gimmicks.” So much drama, projection and misdirection in one little sentence. Mr. Scalise can’t seem to tell socialism from much-needed, good old-fashioned civic improvement -- both in Louisiana and across the country. Any high school civics student could tell him the difference.
But Mr. Scalise doesn’t care. He’s simply continuing the decades-long pattern of Republican propaganda, using the socialism reference as a bogeyman to attack any proposal Republicans invariably oppose -- from Social Security to farm supports to Medicare to labor unions.
“Tax-and-spending spree” is another bit of propaganda from Mr. Scalise’s fairyland. History has shown that the federal deficit is far more likely to increase under Republicans than Democrats. This is not because Democrats want to spend significantly less money — it’s that Republicans prefer to spend, cut taxes on the top incomes and pass the debt to our children and grandchildren.
Democrats believe that all Americans should pay a fair share in taxes – for the benefit of all, not the few. But in Scalise-world, asking the rich to pay more to fund programs that improve Americans’ lives is tantamount to … socialism.
Where was Mr Scalise’s concern for the deficit when he whipped his fellow Republicans into voting for the Trump upper-class/corporate tax cut? That gift to the richest among us will add more than six times what the Democrats’ Build Back Better will add to the deficit over the next decade -- while providing none of the benefits to a majority of the American populace.
Continuing his fairy tale, Mr. Scalise points to the governors’ elections in Virginia and New Jersey as proof that a majority of citizens do not want improved roads, better rural broadband, paid family leave and affordable higher education. How did he come to this conclusion based on the first re-election of a Democratic governor in New Jersey in almost 50 years? Did Scalise determine that it was massive voter dissatisfaction with the idea of safer roads and bridges that caused the election of Glenn Youngkin – and not the historical pattern of Virginia electing other-party governors during a Presidential first term, or that Mr. Youngkin skilfully created and exploited a strawman issue over Critical Race Theory to win one of the closest governor races in modern Virginia?
Mr. Scalise closes with yet another misdirection: New IRS agents are coming to steal your money. As protector of multi-millionaires and billionaires, Mr. Scalise is right to be worried that his largest donors will find it harder to avoid paying taxes to a society from which they have gained so much. For decades, Republicans have cut taxes on the wealthy and slashed IRS collection and enforcement to make it easier for the richest to hide their incomes; the additional agents will be targeting the ultra-rich, not the middle class.
How will Mr. Scalise play out his fantasies? Will he ride in to save the citizens of Louisiana by doing everything in his power to deny the “socialist” funding to improve water quality in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin? Will he try to ensure that I-12 does not receive funds to complete the widening program? How much of the $1 billion bridge funds will Scalise declare to be too socialist for Louisiana?
As a political propagandist of fantasy and myth, Mr. Scalise is actively working to leave his own children and grandchildren -- and ours – a poorer, decaying society controlled by a smaller and smaller band of kleptocrats.