The Path to Perdition

The incessant thrum from the right is that their proposed $5.8 trillion budget fix is for the sake of our children and grandchildren: "We mustn't bequeath them a nation drowning in debt."

Bequeathing them a nation choking on pollution, with a crumbling infrastructure, eroded educational opportunities, a failed regulatory structure and ravaged social safety net and disemboweled Medicare, eh, not so much.

I'd be more impressed that House Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's "The Path to Prosperity" actually gave a damn about grandchildren if the whole thing didn't hinge so disproportionately on saving oodles of cash for Republicans' wealthy overseers.

In the last decade we've witnessed a hundred years of social progress being dismantled piece by piece. The wealth and income gaps between the rich and middleclass are now greater than they've been since the 1920s. States are rolling back labor policies in effect for five decades. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United overturned a century of legal precedent protecting elections from undue corporate influence. Women's reproductive rights, settled case law since 1973, are being nibbled away. The clean air and water and safe food and workplaces we've come to expect are becoming optional.

Actually, progressives should welcome Ryan's bill. Up until now, average Americans have seen only bits and pieces of the Republican agenda. But now, wow! they get a look behind the curtain. They get to connect the dots and see how all that claptrap about saving grandchildren and job-killing regulations and "personalizing" entitlements is nothing but massive transfers of wealth from the middleclass to the already wealthier than God.

For all their blustering patriotism, the budget meat ax crowd has no idea what America's about. Wreaking of hubris and infatuated with the tea party's Mad Hatters, Republicans are deluding themselves the Ryan vision of America as fearful, cynical, mean spirited and miserly is what the majority chooses.

Americans are smart enough to tighten their belts and still save the seed corn; to realize mutual sacrifice doesn't mean obscene tax breaks for the wealthy while untethering the social safety net for everyone else; to know laying waste to a 100 years of social and economic progress runs counter to everything that makes America special.

I've cringed in the past when I see some minorities, women, immigrants, blue collar workers, gays, family farmers, shopkeepers, seniors -- everyone of whom is better off because of the progressive battles their parents and grandparents waged -- forgetting who got them here.

Well this is where the rubber meets the Path. They can now stick-up for the working stiffs, the elderly, the disenfranchised, the vulnerable or cast their lot with Republicans and their corporate keepers and "bequeath" their grandchildren years of clawing back the America they will have tossed away.