Taking Food From Mouths of Babes : Gingrich’s tax cut proposals would just help government better serve the rich.

Newtie has gone too far. When you take food out of the mouths of babes and claim it is in their best interests, as Gingrich did in defending his Draconian budget cuts, you cross the line from mere heartlessness to dangerous demagoguery.

It is one thing to play the mean-spirited reactionary, gutting one social program after another while pandering to the greed of the more affluent voter. That is a morally wrong but logically consistent position. Taking $500 from a child on welfare and giving it to one whose parents earn more than $200,000 a year is a loathsome but defensible position to advocates of a social Darwinism that holds that only the strong deserve to live.

But to claim that the life-preservers for the poor, including the many working poor--medical care, legal aid, college loans, food stamps, Head Start, welfare--are the cause of the drowning is nothing short of the Big Lie technique.

When Gingrich sneers at the Democrats, “If you have a better idea for saving the children of [Washington] D.C., we want it,” he is really arguing that all government programs to help the poor are counterproductive. That’s the ideological cant that Gingrich would burn into our brain through endless repetition. But it is false on its face and he knows it because of his own life experience.

Gingrich, who has lived off the public payroll his entire life, would now deny poor kids any of the privileges which the government extended to him from earliest childhood. He started life as an Army brat educated at the fine U.S. taxpayer-financed school in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and his stepfather’s government salary paid the family’s bills. After that there was government funding for higher education right through graduate school.

He insists that the poor survive at low-paying jobs in the private sector, yet he himself has never had to endure the rigors of the market place. His work experience, other than being a professional politician, was as a teacher in the public college system. For the past 17 years, he has enjoyed all of the perks and high salary of a U.S. Congressman. What order of deceit is it to suggest that medical aid for the poor and elderly be cut when Gingrich has, from childhood to his days in Congress, enjoyed totally free health care at the taxpayers’ expense?

How can Gingrich seriously claim that gutting programs for the poor is necessary to cutting the deficit when he favors $350 billion in tax breaks for the rich through a reduction in the capital-gains tax, elimination of the alternative corporate minimum tax and billions in tax rebates to wealthy families with children? At the same time, the Republicans seek to raise taxes for the working poor by gutting the earned income tax credit. Of all the dumb moves, at a time when we seek to get people off welfare, the Republicans want to boost taxes for people who are working full-time but still can’t get their families out of poverty.

Gingrich poses as an anti-government populist, but what he is really after is putting government, ever more, at the service of the rich and powerful. The sad thing is that many middle-class people, who will bear the brunt of Gingrich’s attacks on government programs are buying the lie. They assume that they are exempt from the cuts which the Gingrich budget envisions.

They need to wake up to the fact that we all benefit from those federal programs which are about to be gutted, whether it’s preservation of the environment, non-commercial broadcasting or medical treatment of the elderly. A strong national government--commerce, energy and education departments included--is essential to our economic well-being. That is the way it is in every successful capitalist society, worldwide, and it is destructive to turn the clock back now.

Gingrich’s targeting of the poor is ludicrous given that he would at the same moment increase defense spending by $70 billion. That should play well in Gingrich’s district, the home of Lockheed. Of course, there is not a word about cutting Lockheed’s F-22 Stealth fighter program with its $72 billion price tag. No matter that the Stealth fighter was designed to penetrate a Soviet air-defense system which no longer exists.

If the deficit is such an overwhelming concern, why not take advantage of the Cold War’s end and make deep cuts in defense? Do we really need yet another atomic carrier or the ability to fight two major wars without allied support?

This country got into its deep financial hole through the Reagan defense buildup and tax cuts of the ‘80s. The Gingrich revolution is more of the same.