One Giant Step Backward

One Giant Step Backward

In 1780, while the elements of the Constitution were being argued Alexander Hamilton spoke to the Philadelphia assembly:  “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are rich and well-born, the other the mass of people…The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.  Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.  They will check the unsteadiness of the second.”     Hamilton was the founder of the Federalist party which over time has become what we now know as the Republican party.  Apparently nothing has changed in their philosophy in over 230 years.

In the past few months some Republican governors, trying to balance their budgets, have proposed everything from massive layoffs to limiting pension pay-outs and denying collective bargaining rights to all public employees, including teachers, police officers and firefighters.  At the same time they have all proposed, as most Republican do, giving tax cuts for the wealthy.  Apparently the Republicans still believe in Hamilton’s principle that that first distinct class of the rich know better what to do with money than the second class, the great majority of the populace.  Unfortunately, that principle does not work.  In fact, in the last 110 years there have only been two Republican presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose tenures in the oval office resulted in job creation and sustainable economic growth.  These two, who were Republican in name only, invested in the middle class by creating public infra-structure projects that put millions of people to work.   While modern Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as their savior, his economic policies were only successful briefly.  Trickle down economics, based on a theory that tax breaks to the wealthy will be reinvested to create private sector jobs, does not work.

But let’s get down to the specifics of two states in particular, Wisconsin and New Jersey.  Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is saying that the only way to relieve the budget deficit is to limit the state employee union’s  right to collective bargaining.  This means that salaries of public workers will be frozen, health care will be more expensive and pensions will not be guaranteed.  Meanwhile, Gov. Walker has given the upper 2% of income earners a $117 million dollar tax cut.

In New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is following the same mantra.  The deficit can’t be fixed unless public employees, especially teachers and police are laid off and take a cut in pension and health care.    Gov. Christie is under a delusion that it’s the unions that have caused this deficit.  History proves otherwise.  It was his Republican predecessor Christine Whitman who borrowed from the state pension fund to fill a hole in the deficit by reinvesting it in the stock market.  When the stock market crashed in 2001 the pension fund collapsed, and because the state is mandated by law to match pension contributions, the deficit widened.  Now he wants to repeal the mandate clause in the pension law so that the state won’t contribute at all and cut pensions altogether for newly hired state employees.  He’s already passed up a $400 million dollar federal education grant that would have meant more teachers, smaller class sizes, and more books and computer resources for New Jersey students, because as he finally admitted, he didn’t want the teachers union (NJEA) to benefit.  And yet he too has given a tax cut to the wealthy.

Unions are not a bad thing as many Republicans would have us believe.  They were created out of necessity to insure safe working conditions and reasonable wages. Before the existence of unions men were working 14 hours a day and were sometimes beaten if they asked for a break, children as young as 6 years old were working in textile mills in Lowell, MA and women were working in sweatshops that had no fire exits.  Collective bargaining is not just about salaries, but includes guidelines for sick leave, vacation hours, lunch breaks and working hours.  Legislatively limiting any union’s ability to bargain for the rights of workers would be taking a huge step backward. 

Are the Republicans really so concerned about their deficit, or are they merely protecting what Hamilton labeled that “first class, the rich” at the expense of the second class, the “other mass that are turbulent and changing"?