I’ve often found politics strange and difficult to understand; a kind of “last refuge of scoundrels”, to take the oft from George Bernard Shaw’s version of Samuel Johnson’s 1775 comment about patriotism. Nowadays, though, as I look around the world, and in my own home country, I’m beginning to think that politics is a safe haven for the unhinged.
Look at the world today and you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re suffering from mass insanity. Russia thumbs her nose at the world and invades Ukraine, and then blames the Ukrainians; generals competing for power in Sudan make war on each other, destroying the country in the process; it’s utter madness.
Things like the foregoing make what’s happening in my own country seem petty by comparison, but if you had to live through it you would probably be as dismayed as I am. Sometimes I fear that we’re no longer the model of good government and civility for the world that we once were.
Some of the things that have happened in the recent past sound like scenes from some satirical movie or TV show, but they are, unfortunately, all too real. Things like a politician who publicly hounded and harassed the young survivor of a school mass shooting because he happened to be pushing for stricter gun controls after the shooting and then cried foul when someone yelled at her in a restaurant, or those who screamed for the deployment of military forces to clear the streets of crowds protesting police brutality but bemoan the arrest and indictment of those who attacked the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former they call violent rioters, the latter they try to portray as aggrieved citizens exercising their right to protest.
These are all examples of tortured minds able to hold opposing views with no apparent cognitive dissonance or sense of the lack of logic in their contradictory positions.
I’m a numbers person, though, and the stands taken by politicians that don’t make sense mathematically are the ones that really leave me scratching my head.
Take for instance, the hardline view by many American politicians on the right concerning tax cuts for the rich and requirements for recipients of certain assistance programs to work. In the former, they support the tax cuts for anyone who is wealthy regardless of what they do or don’t do to acquire that wealth (except, I hope, those who do it in blatantly illegal ways, like dealing drugs), but insist that Medicaid recipients find jobs. Now, in most cases, people qualifying for Medicaid are limited to minimum wage jobs and the same politicians who insist they take jobs object to raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, an amount that’s barely a livable wage in most areas of the United States.
Worse, work requirements have never worked. They do not reduce unemployment or add that many new people to the work force, and they usually cost more to administer than is saved by the reduction of the number of people qualifying for the assistance. Net result: the government pays more and more people lack the medical care they need.
Despite studies that have shown this to be the case, a certain category of politician continues to insist on it, while at the same time, pushing to make tax cuts for the wealthy, which according to the Tax Foundation cost $1.5 trillion in lost revenue to the government while adding only $600 billion in growth and savings. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for example, said on May 16, 2023, that extending the tax cuts on the wealthy that were put in place by the last administration would at $3.5 trillion to the federal deficit. And, who benefits from this largesse? The wealthiest one percent of the population, some of whom pay zero taxes thanks to the politicians who would rather cut benefits to the working poor.
In a logical world, statistics like this would change minds and attitudes, but politics these days is as close to positive as Earth is to Alpha Centauri. The ship of politics is adrift in the sea of confusion and totally unmoored from the safe harbor of reality. – NWI
