Budget deal marks further shift to the right
By Barry Sheppard
The Congressional Republican leadership has made a deal with the Clinton White House on a new federal budget that will slash Medicare (the program to help elderly people with medical costs) and lower taxes for the rich.
Coming on top of last year's junking of the federal welfare program for the needy, the budget indicates the direction the two capitalist parties are moving in, under cover of "balancing the budget".
An editorial in the New York Times points out: "... the whole debate over deficits and government spending has shifted to the right ... today the left wing of the Congressional Democrats is championing what was Mr. Clinton's centrist position of 1992, and Mr. Clinton has moved rightward toward the Republican center."
The Times editors mention that "the deal remains unfairly tilted in favor of the better-off ... It drills scores of new loopholes into the tax code, mostly for the benefit of very wealthy families, at the cost of opening up large deficits early next century ...
"In its political impact, the deal is apt to drive budget struggles in new and contentious directions ... But the brutal fiscal truth is that there are few options available to pay for either tax cuts or new spending programs. Discretionary spending and welfare programs were already slashed deeply in this and last year's budget struggles, and tax hikes are off the political agenda of both parties.
"The most likely result is that [both Democrats and Republicans] will realize that the only way to pay for [their] programs is to cut deeply into middle-class entitlements. The ripest target is sure to be Medicare."
The editorial finishes up with a call to the bipartisan entitlement commission, set up to make recommendations on how to further cut the social wage, to get on with its work.
After Medicare, the next target on the bipartisan hit list will be Social Security, the federal retirement program, which is already insufficient for the elderly to live on.
The whole debate about deficits is a scam, designed to cover up the government attack on social programs that were put into effect as a result of the great labour upsurge in the 1930s and the black struggle in the 1950s-70s.
The budget could easily be balanced by cutting back on the huge appropriations for the war machine — which in this and last year's budget were greater than even the Pentagon asked for — cutting the massive subsidies to the big corporations and raising taxes on the rich.
Beginning with Ronald Reagan's presidency, taxes on the rich have been systematically slashed, and this new budget goes further.
Another scam is how the government accounts Medicare and Social Security money. Taxes on wages are supposedly "earmarked" for "funds" for both programs. Since people are living longer, and there was a blip upward in the birthrate after World War II, these "funds" will be depleted early in the next century, is the claim; there must be big increases in the taxes "earmarked" for them, or the programs must be cut drastically.
This is just an accounting method used to hoodwink workers. There is no reason why the appropriations for Medicare and Social Security can't come from the general funds. The taxes "earmarked" for them are just a part of the total taxes workers pay.
In the past, Congress has taken money from the Social Security "fund" and used it for other purposes, and there is no reason why it can't work the other way around.
The real aim of the ruling class is to cut wages by cutting the social wage, which comes out of the capitalists' profits in the form of taxes on them. That's why we're seeing both tax cuts for the rich and cuts in welfare, Medicaid and, soon to come, Social Security.