"Ideology And Investment" - The Cost Of Republican Extremism

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(Tom Toles, once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle)

We promise to not pair a Tom Toles cartoon with a commentary again, at least for a few days. But Toles must have read Paul Krugman's op/ed in the New York Times on "Ideology and Investment." Here are a few worthy excerpts:

America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer. 

But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.  [snip]

Yet this didn’t have to happen. The federal government could easily have provided aid to the states to help them spend — in fact, the stimulus bill included such aid, which was one main reason public investment briefly increased. But once the G.O.P. took control of the House, any chance of more money for infrastructure vanished. Once in a while Republicans would talk about wanting to spend more, but they blocked every Obama administration initiative.

And it’s all about ideology, an overwhelming hostility to government spending of any kind. This hostility began as an attack on social programs, especially those that aid the poor, but over time it has broadened into opposition to any kind of spending, no matter how necessary and no matter what the state of the economy.  (our emphasis)

That so many voters appear unaware of the danger, much less the existence of this destructive Republican ideology is, of course, appalling in 21st Century America.  Never mind the cranks, crackpots, racists and know-nothings that comprise the base of the Republican Party;  they'll vote for anyone -- even diaper-wearing fetishists =cough= Vitter =cough= and adulterers =cough= Sanford =cough= -- if there's an "R" next to their name on a ballot.  No, we mean the disengaged, distracted voter who, like the cat in Bill Maher's bit below, responds to the least substantive, most superficial impulses in deciding whether to vote, and for whom.  And so, the vandals and cynics get elected by a minority of motivated knuckle-draggers in combination with the marginally sentient, and the downward spiral continues.

It's a problem in American democracy that's only made worse by a media that caters to the worst instincts of the average voter.

UPDATE:  Case in point for the last observation - this Joni Ernst "tongue-bath" by the increasingly un-readable national news section of the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle.