If I vote for you, will you make me poor?

This lovely little piece of anonymously authored misinformation has been circulating around the Web since the 2000 election. It found its way to my inbox for the second time yesterday. It is a classic work of rightwing propaganda, blending questionable facts with specious reasoning. There is a reasonably thorough analysis of this email at Snopes. The article puts forth the idea, encapsulated in a fake quote from an imaginary author that states:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The article then lists a series of "facts" that are meant to scare the beejeezus out of the casual reader. Of course the whole point is to "prove" that America is going to hell in a hand basket because most of us are on the dole, supported by those who vote for Bush. From the email:

In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare...

The facts of this piece don't stand close scrutiny. It would be easy and kind of fun to tear it apart. Alas, it would be boring. It is far more interesting to disassemble the argument itself. How often have you heard a talking head or one of your acquaintances spit out the typical Republican harangue against a culture of entitlement? Often enough, I'd wager. It is particularly timely to examine this thread in light of Bush's recently released 2005-06 budget, the one Paul Krugman calls Dooh Nibor Economics (Robin Hood in reverse). When the numbers are examined in any kind of detail, it is immediately clear that the President means to continue to aggressively pursue reducing taxes, cutting social spending, and using government money and power to better the bottom line for big business and rich people. That's why it's called Robin Hood in Reverse: You take from the poor and give to the rich.

But doesn't this cause somewhat of an ideological train wreck for Republicans? Like the theme of the piece of trash above, it is a part of the Republican story that Democrats vote to give handouts to undeserving freeloaders sucking their sustenance off the government tit while doing absolutely nothing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, all of which will ultimately lead to our enslavement. Yet the Bush and the Republican-controlled House and Senate have made themselves pigs at the public trough in a way that is truly unprecedented. It is true that Democrats tend to focus on socially progressive legislation and that this legislation can be viewed as "entitlements" for individuals. But the expense of these programs is nothing, nothing when compared to the expense to the American people of the richest corporate handouts in the history of the country. Three Consecutive tax-cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The Medicare bill. Healthy Forests. Clear Skies. The nation's Energy Policy. Each is a carefully wrapped gift, hand delivered to corporate America by President Bush. I truly believe that enlightened capitalism harnessed through the American economy is the most powerful force for positive change in the world. What does enlightened mean? It means we don't rig the system to favor the big guys; it means everybody has a shot; it means we take care of the earth and people in the system.The people, the workers and executives are the soul of the system. We can't crush the soul of the system. In this election, it's the people, stupid.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution addresses The Effects of Recent Fiscal Policies on Today's Children and Future Generations. It unequivocally states:

Recent and proposed fiscal policies—the tax cuts, proposals to make them permanent, and the Medicare prescription drug bill—will hurt economic prospects for most of today's children and all future generations. The programs will leave economic growth largely unchanged, but will redistribute resources from future to current generations and, within each generation, from low- and middle-income families toward an affluent minority. These effects exacerbate the impact of underlying federal budget trends and processes that will place significant, imminent pressure on funding for children's programs. An expanded program of investments in children is both feasible and desirable.

Oh yes, the treasury is being pillaged. But it isn't by people living in tenements in big cities. It isn't by the working poor in fly-over land, who by the way, supported Bush in 2000. The treasury is being pillaged by President Bush and the wealthy Republican supporters who paid for the privilege. As a result, negative social consequences will emerge. If Bush is re-elected and his policies become permanent, they will mark the character of the near American future. Families and small businesses can expect an increase in bankruptcies. Those on the edge of the poverty line will move closer to poverty through lower median incomes. Many workers will feel the bite as the workplace becomes hostile. Of particular concern is of course the effect on children as foreclosures increase and health insurance gets harder to come by. The distribution of these consequences will be weirdly ironic. The Bush policy agenda is aimed squarely at those good working people in the red states who support Bush.

The Red States (aka. Bush country, or flyover land) are populated by lower income, agrarian, social conservatives-- the exact people for whom Bush policies are an unmitigated disaster. Yet these are the people who steadfastly support the president, even when it is, by most objective standards, against their self-interest to do so. This point is eloquently argued in April's issue of Harper's magazine by Thomas Frank, in Lie Down for America, How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great Plains:

Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.

What are we to say to people who vote themselves into poverty? Who rebel against a "culture of entitlement" by entitling those who earn one hundred, two hundred, one thousand times more than they do to take more of what little they have? I think for me, it begins by identifying the common ground. Something like, "Hi, my name is Chris Dykstra. I'm a Conservative American. That's why I'm voting for John Kerry."