The Fittest Survive on the Backs of Children and the Poor : Media: The pundits who work the lecture circuit don’t share the pain of the budget cuts.

The budget showdown has become a matter of fun and games for the media, with the talking heads endlessly handicapping the winners and losers in the fight between Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. Rarely is there any evidence of concern that serious issues affecting the survival of many Americans might be at stake. How else to explain Time magazine selecting Newt Gingrich “Man of the Year” for his rob-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget.

But that’s understandable. The stars of the national media corps may be “liberal” on social issues, abortion, Internet censorship and the like, but on economic matters they run with the financial wolves. The Republican capital gains tax cut must look mighty attractive to people who have benefited from the run-up of the market and now are just waiting to cash in. No longer staffed by ink-stained and underpaid wretches, the modern media are dominated by folks who can make more from a couple of choice speaking engagements before trade associations than many workers earn in a year. Their lifestyles are removed from the gut economic sacrifices that the Republican budget requires of poorer Americans, including the many working poor, to pay for the tax breaks for the well-off.

How else to explain the “what, me worry” response to the deep cuts in the Medicaid program along with an end to the federal guarantee of health care to the poor? How many of our high-priced commentators even know someone who might depend on Medicaid coverage when their kid comes down with something really serious? The Medicaid program covers more than one in five American children, half of whom have working parents. Not many of those parents are regulars with Ted Koppel or Jim Lehrer.

Even those of us in the second tier of media celebritydom who manage to make it to the big leagues every once in a while have to make a concerted effort to step outside our own skins to see what’s going on. When the president warned, accurately, that the Republican budget plan “eliminates Head Start for 180,000 preschoolers,” I had to force myself to take that information in. My mind quickly wandered to some other story in the paper. There weren’t too many Head Starters darting in and out of my local Starbucks, where I was more worried that whole milk had been foamed into my double cappuccino instead of nonfat. Much more convenient to accept the Gingrich line that poor kids are going to be made better off by Congress cutting off tutoring and all of those other “failed liberal programs” that create a “welfare mentality.”

But it’s not just the recognizable poor that will have to pay for the Republicans’ proposed $ 245-billion faux tax cut. It does not actually cut the tax burden of most Americans, who will be receiving less from their government in needed services and paying more in the long run to plug the holes in the national safety net. The cuts in federal programs mean increased social disarray and necessitate higher taxes on the state and local level. The rapid increase in state prison budgets is but one example.

Let’s label the Republican budget for what it is: social engineering. Driven by the ideology of social Darwinism, the Republicans have cynically exploited the goal of a balanced budget to make this a markedly more unequal society. If the real purpose were a balanced budget, why in the world would they even be talking about tax cuts?

Nope, these fellows have something much more radical in mind. The balanced budget is merely a club to be used in a class war by those who presume themselves winners against those they deem life’s natural losers. The object is to force some of the stragglers in the modern economy to sink out of sight and mind, while others will be forced to swim even harder against ever more dangerous currents produced by corporate downsizing, weakened labor unions and the export of decent jobs.

Most of us media pundits are good swimmers. We will probably make out just fine even with the Gingrich revolution. Hopefully, we won’t need Medicare and can use our tax breaks to find safe neighborhoods, private schools and clean air. We won’t have to live near hazardous waste sites that will remain rancid and we can afford bottled water. Maybe the cuts in programs aimed at drugs and violence in the schools won’t adversely affect us. Our kids weren’t going to qualify for those 350,000 college scholarships, nor were they likely to end up in AmeriCorps. And they certainly won’t be among the 1 million children forced into poverty.

But even in our crowd of fast swimmers, some will wake up one day and wonder what all those dead fish are doing in the water.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. He can be reached via e-mail at 76327.1675@compuserve.com