The Hidden History of American Oligarchy by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann [Thom Hartmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2021-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

“Starve the Beast” and Gut the Republic

One of the most successful ways in which the oligarchs, using their think tanks and media, have convinced Americans that government is bad and government functions should be privatized and run by oligarchs is through a strategy that the Reagan administration first articulated and was described in the Wall Street Journal in 1985.14 It was called “starve the beast,” and essentially it follows a simple three-step process.

First, Republicans promote the idea that taxes are too high and are strangling the ability of rich people and their companies to stimulate the economy, which, they say, would raise every working person’s pay and benefits. On this promise, they pass massive corporate, individual, and capital gains tax cuts.

Second, they point out that there’s now a huge deficit (because of the tax cut) and declare that it’s vital to “cut waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the system—and so they cut staffing to agencies like the EPA, IRS, and Social Security Administration.

When Trump came into the White House, Social Security Administration staffing was already 10 percent below what it had been in 2011, and because of previous staffing cuts, the agency had a backlog of more than 1.1 million disability claims. Wait times were running over two years.

So, of course, the good Republicans in the Trump administration proposed that as many as 15,000 of the Social Security Administration’s 62,000 employees now qualified for early retirement and could leave work with a nice parachute anytime they wanted to.

As Government Executive magazine reported in August 2017, “About 15,000 of SSA’s 62,000 employees meet” the criteria for early retirement. “President Trump through executive order and the Office of Management and Budget through subsequent guidance directed agencies to develop plans to trim their workforces. . . . SSA joins the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department in offering separation incentives this year.”15

The predictable result of this chipping away at the federal workforce was a collapse in customer service and regulatory oversight. As wait times for meetings with Social Security and Medicare workers lengthened, the third part of the plan kicked in: Once the government agency is successfully hobbled—the beast is starved—roll out an alternative where some crony friend of the politicians can make money off of what was previously a government-only service.

Trump did this with Obamacare during the sign-up period in late 2018, cutting access to the website, dialing back promotion of the program, and adding complexities and hoops that would discourage people from signing up for government-subsidized health insurance. And, sure enough, enrollment dropped.

Another area where “starve the beast” has successfully been used is the IRS, which is now so severely understaffed that they’ve largely stopped auditing rich people’s returns, realizing Leona Helmsley’s declaration that “only the little people pay taxes.”16 They’ve also starved the Veterans Administration, where a new privatization scheme is further cutting VA funds by redistributing them to for-profit health care institutions owned by American oligarchs.17

Billionaire oligarch Betsy DeVos, the US secretary of education, and other oligarchs

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