A medieval solution

If God is indeed just, there is a special place in hell reserved for Grover Norquist and his philosophy of “drowning government in a bathtub”. Unfortunately, we know the divine entity plays favorites, so Norquist probably got rich selling stocks weeks ago as some of his Congressional friends did.

For those who have been in a cave for the last 40 years, Grover Norquist is the dedicated disciple of the gospel of supply-side economics and tax cuts to enable supply-side economics. Along with evangelical nut cases like Mike Pence, “Norquist has been responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.” Namely that, no matter how many epidemics, wars, and recessions you are fighting off – it is a mortal sin to ever, ever, ever raise taxes. Particularly for pointless wars like the War in Iraq, which – when combined with Bush’s and Trump’s tax cuts have driven the federal debt to sky-high levels.

If there is one particular thing that the COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated clearly, is that most of the GOP’s privatization dreams and attacks on public services set the United States up for horrendous failure. In treating services that are fundamentally utilities- like individual products -and giving American businesses the right to price gouge, they created a system that fails under the weight of a crisis like we are in now.

Health Care is the best example and the one feeling the brunt of the pain. The GOP has never recognized public access to health care as a right and has bent over backward to cater to Big Pharma and Big Insurance while working overtime to screw poor Americans. The lack of a public option and universal access to healthcare has contributed to the inability of the government to address the outbreak.

( As it’s not the point of the article, I will not digress further on this subject – but there is plenty of documentary evidence on the issue. I recommend you start here and then branch out.)

Another example is the Internet, which people are relying on to telework and tele-study. As a result, the use of bandwidth is skyrocketing. The current administration fought hard against net-neutrality legislation undoing it. The current FCC commissioner has been known for his opposition to net neutrality.

Trucks, ships, and planes are having to keep supplies moving to meet the demand of toilet buying Americans. They are doing so in port facilities that need improvement and a terrible road system that has not been maintained properly.

There are plenty of other issues that matter, public schools, sanitary and water services and of course electricity.

In summary, as Forbes points out in this article, “Americans Are Getting A Hard Lesson In Why Government — And Taxes — Actually Matter”.

Services cost money and they need to be paid for:

More than 90 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” and for nearly as long, those words have been chiseled over the entrance of the IRS building.

Civilized society, in the view of someone like Holmes, includes a lot of what most people call government — and what Norquist regards as an encroachment on personal liberty and property rights.

When he spoke to NPR in 2001, Norquist said he hoped to see the size of American government shrink by half over the next 25 years. By any measure, he seems certain to miss that mark. But Norquist has played a key role in keeping a lid on federal taxes while supporting many kinds of spending reductions.

Over time, the result has been the emergence of a federal state that — while hardly in danger of being drowned in a bathtub — isn’t nearly as rigorous as it might have been. Starved of resources, non-defense discretionary spending has been falling for about a decade. This spending is the kind that pays for medical research, for instance, as well as disaster relief and economic security programs.

American fiscal politics have facilitated this rather unhappy compromise, in which taxes stay relatively low and valuable government programs continue to slowly degrade.

Despite being the recipients of generous so called, ” pro-business policies” a whole host of companies have their hands out for a bailout – using tax payer money. Even though they did not use the cash they had to make their companies stronger.

Over the past decade, major airlines — including Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Southwest — have used roughly 96% of their cash flow on stock buybacks, according to Bloomberg. By reducing share count, these repurchases have pushed stock prices higher.

In the process, they’ve drawn criticism for how they’ve boosted shareholder returns without directly helping businesses. The activity is central to a broader discussion about how companies use their cash — and whether they should be doing something different.

They will get the money of that I am sure, but I really hope they adopt some of the strings on it that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.

Here are Warren’s eight conditions:

• Companies must maintain payrolls and use federal funds to keep people working.
• Businesses must provide $15 an hour minimum wage quickly but no later than a year from the end
• Companies would be permanently banned from engaging in stock buybacks.
• Companies would be barred from paying out dividends or executive bonuses while they receive federal funds and the ban would be in place for three years.
• Businesses would have to provide at least one seat to workers on their board of directors, though it could be more depending on size of the rescue package.
• Collective bargaining agreements must remain in place.
• Corporate boards must get shareholder approval for all political spending.
• CEOs must certify their companies are complying with the rules and face criminal penalties for violating them.

I’m not holding my breath that this will happen. It should though.

Governments exist to provide services and many of the “products” government has privatized are not products at all, they are public utilities and therefore should be funded and regulated as such.

So as a first step, let’s start by burning Grover Norquist (in effigy) at the stake on The Mall in Washington DC. Use a drone to publicly televise it and make it a morale-building event. It could be an offering to the Almighty to spare us from the Trump plague.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Lest there be any doubt, I am NOT saying that Grover Norquist should ACTUALLY be burned at the stake ( no matter how much he deserves it). Sure it brings a smile to mine and many other faces, but I am certain there are those who won’t find this bit of sarcasm funny in the least.

But it is necessary to forcefully drive the point home to guys like Norquist and the rest of the herd who have made rich livings out of publicly advocating for cruelty and selfishness. “In the wake of the crisis, it will be harder to ignore the real-world cost of cutting taxes.……..As the nation confronts the huge demands of trying to arrest the pandemic’s spread, the weakness of crucial agencies and institutions is increasingly evident. We have underinvested in things that don’t matter every day but matter enormously when the stakes are very high.  “

Norquist helped create this mess. Now he needs to pay for the folly of his ideas.