WAS: What Adults are Saying about the Day the New Deal Died
Recent Legislation will Change America for the Worse
Narrow, partisan passage of July 3rd legislation will bring significant change to all Americans. Especially impacted will be those at the bottom-part of the economic totem pole. Occurring on the eve of celebrating our national birthday, alongside now a fully cuckold media apparatus, it will take a little while for this impact to sink in even though if we had enough stomach to look, it’s already boldly evident.
This is especially true in the volumes of homeless we step around at our favorite holiday vacation places, or in awaiting an indifferent administration response to the latest natural disaster, or in even getting life-saving weather information on a timely basis. The things that have made America a modern country are being dismantled at an alarming rate—largely so that elites can further gorge on power and filthy lucre.
But just like a cross country road-rally the July 3rd legislation brings a definitive end. As started by Ronald Reagan some 45 years ago it is a point where “us vs. them” politics has gone to an extreme level of self-devour. With it we now have fully demonized the poor, romanticized ignorance and established as virtuous the continued indifference to our old, sick, hurting or pained brothers and sisters. We have taken a secular country and turned it into the vision of salivating Christo-Nationalists only to realize few of them live lives by the principles of Jesus Christ. We have somehow made the “con” as dished by many, noble—in a twisted, dystopian, ugly way that steals from both our wallets and souls. In doing this we have also killed—after over 90 years of struggle for some misguided tyrants—the New Deal.
One can’t find a single American who for a long time and in a variety of ways has not benefitted from the New Deal and the philosophy of government policy it spawned. Developed when the US was on its proverbial knees, it and a narrow World War II victory—significantly aided by Russia in its most critical moments—were the paramount historical events that created the lifestyle most Americans have known and enjoyed. As big government efforts go the New Deal then and since, was never universally excepted by America and has long been the bane of certain political stripes on the right who gradually developed into monstrous caricatures. They the lap dogs of “unfettered capitalism” and pure free markets spewed an ideology long filled with a bevy of nonsense, “trickle down” and modern impracticalities that would impair any growing country, but especially one as diverse, complex and large as the United States.
That’s because it embraces a convenient yet inaccurate myth that unregulated “free markets” are what unleash the value of all peoples because it forces rigid self-reliance. While that might sound like a nice point to preach but after about three class sessions in Econ 101 one realizes that’s horse hockey. In a vibrant, new and exciting post-war America the only folk who economically succeeded without government, community or institutional help were the gilded rich who held that status before the war (and the preceding Great Depression) even started. The rest of it is non-sensical myth and political retailers have used endless characters or people (Horatio Alger, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Tony Soprano) to illustrate the wrong-headedness of their view.
Little of that wealth creation would have been possible without a growing infrastructure that might get products to market in a timely way (does the Interstate Highway System fit here?), or a public higher education system were student attendance was facilitated by dozens of Federal programs, or government guaranteed bank deposits. All of these things and many, many more are direct descendants of the New Deal and the idea that the government should serve its people. Seems pretty sensible in that the “government” and its “people” are one in the same.
To ensure the New Deal is not seen as some abstract thing, below are just a few of the things that it developed or inspired.
+ Head Start Education for pre-school children
+ Grants for academic researchers and scientists
+ Social Security
+ Medicare for the aged and Medicaid for the poor
+ Regulatory guardrails to the manufacturing and use of medicines
+ An unparalleled public health system that until very recently broadly succeeded at getting school children vaccinated.
+ The eradication of polio and other pernicious diseases
+ The GI Bill for military veterans to aid transition back into civilian society.
+ Standards to curb the misuses of industrial polluters to both air and water.
+ A weather forecasting system that was the envy of the world.
+ Pell Grants, work study and dozens of similar programs that facilitated college attendance for virtually any desiring student.
+ A fair, uniform system of weights and measures.
+ Workplace safety
+ Unparalleled protection to our national parks and lands
Get it? Somewhere a doctorate student is busily finishing research that will itemize all of the programs that came from the New Deal and its government policy antecedents. That list will be long—perhaps so long as to be unreadable. For nearly five decades a certain American political stripe has been working to end this effort. Now they have finally reached the end of that line for them and seemingly, for everyone else too. Their twisted, mendacious motivations and ambitions have already brought pain and mayhem to America. It’s about to bring a lot more.