Why Financial Conservatives Can't See The Big Picture

As I stated in a previous blog, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner removed all social safety net spending from the State budget. He wanted to get rid of the State's deficit by removing all "unnecessary" funding. Let's ignore the fact that he inadvertently said that all people on welfare, have a disability, or are on unemployment are basically worthless to society. Let's also not talk about the fact that he is about to raise property taxes (he said they'd go down with his new system), and give more tax breaks to the upper 1%. Instead, let's focus on the financial drain that Rauner is creating.

Hundreds of social agencies are either letting people go, drastically cutting employee hours, or both. This means that thousands of people are now going to be earning less. As such, we will also be paying less in taxes that are supposed to go to Rauner's business owner friends. You know, the ones that get subsidies for shipping jobs overseas.

Besides the direct loss of tax revenue, those of us affected by Rauner's new budget will be spending less on everything. That means no small item purchases, like clothing, computers, or household items. No big ticket items like housing, cars, or furniture. Forget about investing through stocks or bonds for Illinois businesses. Forget about being able to save for your children's college.

And as we stop spending money on these items, we also stop generating sales tax. A tax that is estimated when planning the State budget. Which means it will not be truly balanced in the long run, resulting in a deficit again next year. That means next year, working class people will have to cut their spending even more, resulting in fewer sales for businesses, fewer education funds for children, and less sales tax for the next budget.

When I was a kid, I grew up on the far south side of Chicago. We had several steel mills, Ford, Dodge and GM had thriving factories in the area. We also had farms scattered around, a small airport in Lansing, and of course, shopping. I visited a friend that still lives there the other day (Hi, Shawn). I knew the plants and factories had long since died out, thanks in part to the Regan presidency and his fiscal stupidity (remember "trickle down economics?").

The farms also started to get paved over, during the Farm Aid area of fiscal idiocy. Not that Farm Aid was idiotic. It helped out farmers that truly needed aid. It was the whole idea that land taxes were more important than the food produced, unless you were part of a national farm system, the kind of commercial farms that McDonald's or Kraft has.

The Lansing Municipal Airport is still listed in search engines. I didn't have the heart to see if the parachute club was still there. The one that used to bring in spectators like my grandfather and myself, who'd go there on Saturday mornings, watch the beautiful parachute designs, then get a hair cut, shop, or do whatever we had to do.

Besides the factories, mills, and farms, the major thing that is now missing in the area is the revenue that they provided. Sales from fresh produce sold right on the farmer's property. American made steel formed and cut here in Illinois. The American made cars that we so proudly owned and showed off when we bought them. Bought with the jobs that these farms, mills, and factories provided.

I know the first thing that fiscal conservatives say is that it's the unions' fault that all of this went away. They want people to believe that greedy, working class people that insisted on a wage that would feed their families, clothe their families, house their families, and if the kids wanted to go, would provide a college education for their families.

The fiscals are wrong. The wages helped to buy the items that were made or grown at these places. Living wages produced sales that helped to keep the companies in business profitable. It also provided sales taxes from both the industries and the workers that helped to build the State into a once great place to live.

I still remember what it was like before the first expressway came into my family's life. I-90/94 made it possible not just for my family to commute faster and easier to relatives many miles away. It also allowed children in the far south suburbs a faster, more economical way to get to Chicago museums like the Adler Planetarium, The Museum of Science and Industry, or the Natural History Museum. And of course, the roads provided industries in the area a fast, cheap, easy way to get their products shipped around the area, and into other states as well.

Industries did not create the highways and express way systems, taxpayers did. Despite what the people who watch FOX News want you to believe, it was not fiscal conservatism that created our public roads, it was us, the tax payer. Rich and poor alike. All because we paid our fair share of taxes, and were actually proud to do so.

Our national pride is eroding rapidly. Our school system is no longer the best in the world. Our dollar is no longer the strongest in the world. We are not the healthiest, smartest, or the most ambitious nation in the world. Slowly, we are becoming a Third World Country. All because of fiscal conservatives that think the Victorian Era was the right way to live. Bring back the debtor prisons, arrest the poor, and force them to work in sweat shops for pennies a day.

As long as we, the voters, allow our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, to keep opening new tax loopholes for the richest of us, and keep forcing the hardest working among us to pay all of the taxes, the fiscals will keep making life harder for us. They can't see the big picture, because they won't admit that it's there. It really is that simple.

As long as they see Atlas Shrugged as a blue print for a better society, a society where the rich don't have to be taxed, and workers shut up and stay in their place, we will keep loosing more and more equality in a country that claims "all men are created equal."

So good bye social safety net. People with mental disabilities are already starting to take up jail space, because we don't have the funds to care for them. To provide them the extra help in terms of housing or job training that they need to be profitable in the eyes of the fiscally conservative. Politicians like Bruce Rauner will never see them as respectable members of society.  All because fiscally conservatives can't see what the big picture is.

We are a society. Society means all people, not just the rich. Not just the beautiful. Not just the smartest. Society is all people. Rich and poor, physically able and those that aren't for any reason. That's the big picture. And politicians like Rauner just refuse to admit that it exists.