That was Bush 41's idea. He was trying to sell his idea of a "kinder, gentler conservatism". It was a tacit admission he thought most people found the bombast and bullshit directed at the poor and working classes by the Reagan people to be offensive and corrosive. Who are we to disagree? It was an admission Bush knew we had been moved from making war on poverty to damned near making war on the poor. Bush acknowledged Reagan's "Voo-Doo" economics had turned the working class into the working poor. Somehow, Reagan was able to sell devastating economic stagnation as some sort of success for genuinely bad ideas. As it turned out, Bush 41 couldn't repeat that kind of "success".
Before I go further, it's necessary to point out there were a lot of reasons for that stagnation that Reagan had no control over or responsibility for. The problem with Reagan was that very few of his ideas or actions did anything but make it all worse. Ignore the rhetoric and just look at the stats. I know we have a generation who think Reagan was their kindly grandfather but statistics and results don't lie. It's all there in bold print and it runs thru the fine print like black crepe.
Bush was trying to continue the "voo-doo" myth by building up the Angels of our better nature. He was trying to encourage private entities to take up the slack in what the financially crippled government just was no longer willing to do. All of that to protect the violence the Reagan people had done to the tax code.
To be honest we did a pretty good job. Working people of all intermediate classes had no tax cuts but they did step up charity. We had no relief of our burden we just accepted additional burdens while the upper tax brackets were significantly reduced. Burdens on the economically most productive shrank. Try as we might, conditions definitely deteriorated.
Now we face an official assault on the least among us that doesn't seem to have precedent. It's both gross and subtle. Even Reagan never attacked the hungry. Even Reagan never tried to elicit cheers for the idea of the poor dying in the streets. What sense does it make to attack a simple appeal to charity? There are wheels within wheels even in Heaven just as there are wheels within wheels in Hell or republican party politics.
Well, that's all pretty bleak but the response is encouraging.
There was an attack on and a cut in federal funding for Meals on Wheels. It's been privately funded far beyond what the feds were doing.
There has been an attack on civil liberties across the board. I just read contributions to the ACLU have increased five-fold.
A powerless individual can't be attacked without some sort of Go Fund Me page providing more than enough for their defense.
The children taken into custody at the border have fully funded defenses. Though why they need some sort of defense is a mystery to me.
Look, my point is; here we are, perfectly capable of providing for the things we see that need done. The things I've pointed out are the exceptional cases that have drawn attention. But what about the mundane? Didn't we used to have a government where we all worked together to relieve the exceptional and the mundane? Why do we pay ever more to have a government that doesn't extend help to all? That's not the idea. The government is not supposed to make enemies of some segment of society whether they be rich or totally deprived.
This is America. We encourage the exceptional and support the less fortunate. We've proved for two centuries that model works best.
Get with the program! We're all points of light. How brightly can you shine?
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