It’s ironic how aroused the GOP perennially gets over bashing Democrats for crafting too many regulations and increasing the size of bureaucracy because it’s actually often Republicans who increase the amount of red tape.
Let’s consider food stamps as a poster boy example of Republican outrage against the government. The policy exists because Democrats believe that if citizens do not have enough money to survive, the government should try to help them so they and their families do not starve to death like oppressed peoples living in corrupt, failed states occasionally do. It’s a fairly mild charitable expectation for a country that culturally considers itself “exceptional,” “globally indispensable,” and a “beacon of freedom, liberty, and prosperity” to act upon.
Democrats therefore support policies that give assistance to everyone who qualifies, and there is a very simple, straightforward way to do this given that every single year Americans file tax returns so the federal government knows how much money people make. In theory, by utilizing this already collected information, there need not be much of any overhead other than what it takes administerially to mail out food stamps to eligible individuals because the government can easily determine if someone qualifies or not.
But Republicans dislike the food stamp program, among many other subsidized programs, for various ideological reasons, and say they don’t want tax dollars to pay for poor and “lazy” people to get benefits “paid for” by “productive” and “hardworking” people. There’s plenty of room for debate about these judgements on the validity of safety net programs, though I’d like to point out that, in our modern era, most wealth is accumulated and hoarded by already rich people who increasingly don’t pay fairly proportional taxes on their gains, and most often have earned their money from some combination of nepotism, inheritances, and stock portfolios dependent on privatized profits from corporate exploitation of labor, consumers, environment and the climate, as well as dependence on socialized responsibility for the consequences, damages, and costs that come from such fundamentalist devotion to the profit motive. Anecdotally, the hardest working people I know, such as roofers working in July, or waitresses working three weekend double-shifts in a row, or soldiers on patrol in a hostile desert nation, are typically not rich.
But political ideology and moral judgements on financial accumulation aside, welfare programs do exist, and “fiscally conservative” Republicans paradoxically make them more expensive and less efficient with legislative contributions that add extra rules and hurdles on who can qualify, like requiring voluminous registration paperwork, asking for superfluous information, mandating periodic drug tests, adding various means tests, and instilling social stigmas against accepting assistance, which means eligible people are less likely to sign up while the bureaucratic process is more likely to screw up paperwork, deny qualified claimants, decrease claimant gratitude, and diminish public approval.
With added complexity comes more overhead as programs need to hire more bureaucrats to communicate with and help claimants, train staff, and ensure the registration process is completed in accordance with all the applicable laws and regulations, which means less money is spent on actual assistance, and more money is spent on administrative and operational costs. Unsurprisingly, the program will operate less effectively and less efficiently, which Republicans then in bad faith point out as evidence of the program’s alleged waste and obsolescence in their bid to cut spending on welfare programs to benefit their true agenda of gutting the government in order to lower tax rates on corporations and the already very rich.
Food stamps are one of Republicans’ most eternal austerity targets, but most of Democrats’ beloved welfare initiatives and programs are similarly kneecapped by conservative subterfuge. Sometimes this is most frustratingly perpetrated by conservative Democrats with suspicious lobbyist ties and eye-rollingly big corporate campaign donations, such as the defeats liberals experienced in passing Obamacare, for which a universal system would have allowed every American to get on a governmental plan dramatically lowering prices for everyone, and for which a single-payer system would have cut out the wild administrative excesses that currently make America spend alarmingly more money on healthcare than peer nations with alarmingly worse outcomes and access.
Another recent example of absurdist conservatism is a handful of Republicans’ dubious calls for ending OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, due to the Biden Administration’s efforts to have OSHA mandate that employers with 100 or more employees be required to have work forces vaccinated for COVID. Junior Representative Madison Cawthorn didn’t wait long after the announcement to tweet out that he was filing a bill to “gut OSHA.”
At first glance, such an act might seem like a conservative victory, given that OSHA is responsible for a plethora of costly and tedious regulations that ensure workers aren’t poisoned, maimed and killed on the job by lazy, greedy, and sociopathic employers. Surely businesses and corporations would benefit financially from tolerating much higher degrees of workplace danger, but, over the long run, our government would have to spend much more money on healthcare and assistance for disabled workers as well as surviving widows and orphans that dead workers would leave behind.
In fact, conservatives should love OSHA for how much money it saves the government in potential welfare spending, and value OSHA’s insistence that employers pay the upfront business costs of workplace safety rather than passing off the costs of disabled and dead workers to taxpayers later on. This is the bureaucratic red tape that Democrats and Republicans alike, in a good faith left-right paradigm, should approve of as it ensures that companies can’t privatize the profits of unsafe labor while socializing the inevitable costs. That’s not political at all, it’s just good stewardship of the public interest!
But contemporary American politics is not a good faith left-right paradigm, and Republicans are just bad at government.
Poems
The Hand-Off
with a wink to the mexican and a handshake eye to eye
he hands me the bag and I hand him the money
and he walks back inside
and I get on the transit tram and can’t wait
I open up the bag and smell it
damn it’s potent stuff
and start eating.
it’s the best burrito I’ve ever had
I tipped four dollars on the order online
and must have gotten double the steak as usual.
Thin Blue Line
it’s quiet tonight but the tickets pay the bills
so blinding spotlights beam down alleyways and side streets
from marauding justice cars in the neighborhood maze
stalking civil rights in darkened drives
doing the shady things impunity allows
when we don’t arrest our own.
Thanks for your digital eyeball attention!
—Dash MacIntyre