Years ago, there was a ubiquitous ad on the TV machine for oil filters. Whose ad it was has long since become irrelevant, but the point of the ad has only increased in relevance over the last ten years.
In the ad, a mechanic holds up the oil filter and tells the audience that your oil filter is important to keeping your car running as it should. He tells us that cheaping out on your filter will cost you much more in repairs later than his filter costs now. It's the simple concept of preventive maintenance being far less costly than maintenance deferred.
I bring this up to illustrate the idiocy of the hackneyed right-wing saw about the need to reduce the deficit - apparently at any cost to the lower and middle class - as well as to suggest an avenue for deflating that particular talking point.
The federal budget deficit is brought up constantly by republicans hoping to cut to oblivion any program that helps the less fortunate. They argue that the deficit is insupportable in the long term, and that it would be unfair and morally wrong to leave that debt to our children and grandchildren. While true in general, I would argue that the means they've choosen to address the issue have far worse implications.
Any frequent visitor to this site can probably recite the litany of reasons for the current federal budget deficit, so I won't list them here. I think that most of us would agree that, in the long term, large deficits are not the best way to run a government. I also think that it is generally accepted here at DK, that traditional "austerity measures" are, and will continue to be, at the very least, counterproductive.
Unfortunately for republicans, they have ignored a huge part of what their hoped for austerity would mean to business and the wealthy. Along with cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps and other programs benefitting most of the population, republicans and Tea-Partiers have come out against a lot of infrastructure spending, like highway projects, and investments in basic science and technology research which can pay off big in the long term. The republican thinking seems to be that, if faced with a starvation victim, a little strangulation will bring him around. Utter nonsense, but that's their prescription.
So the nation's infrastructure will have much-needed maintenance deferred even longer and degrade that much more. The need for maintenance will become a need for rebuilding or replacement, and that won't be cheap. That also doesn't take into account the cost of the occasional failure. Even if you ignore the potential human cost of a bridge collapse, what does the increased transportation to go around the obstacle cost in terms of time and money? How much does it cost companies and the general public every year to repair the damage done to vehicles by driving through potholes on a road that should have been repaved ten years ago?
Obviously, they don't want to pay now, at least if it means increasing revenues (i.e. tax increases). The only thing they say they won't cut is the Pentagon budget. Ironically, one of the major rationales for the interstate highway system was to provide fast reliable transport routes for the military in times of threats to our national security. Ask a Vermonter how fast things got done when bridges and roads were impassable and everthing had to move by helicopter after hurricane Irene. Federal disaster funds helped to fix things relatively quickly, but some tea-partiers want to cut that, too.
The alternative, for you business owners and wealthy individuals, is the pay later option. As they continue to whine about how put-upon they are and buying political influence, I suggest they also begin to calculate the long term costs to them, their businesses and their families, of current trends. They should consider the following;
* Increased transportation and raw materials costs (time and repairs) due to deteriorating roads and bridges. Also rich people can be squashed in a bridge collapse just as easily as poor people.
* Increasing difficulty finding qualified employees to make their products due to school budget cuts undermining education.
* Higher costs for private security necessitated by cuts to police budgets and personnel. Oh, fire departments, too
* The potential need to supply their own drinking and process water due to detrioration of treatment plants. Yeah. Local austerity measures.
* The cost of legal help when the onerous regulations holding their businesses back are repealed. Allowing businesses to "self-regulate" will enable lots of line-items to be cut from the budget, but require huge expenditures to settle disputes between businesses.
The list goes on. Progressives understand how dangerous the short-sightedness of conservative's and tea-partier's pathological hatred of taxes and government truly is, even as they rely on both (Medicare, etc. and the bill of rights) to sustain them and give them a voice.
They also fail to understand that, given trends in wealth concentration, and the decreasing income and buying power of the middle class, that same middle class will not have the resources to contribute to the eventual repair and replacement of badly neglected infrastructure.
Thus, the choice. Recognize the current need to pay for upkeep and get at least some help from the middle class in doing so, or continue to put off long overdue maintenance until the middle class is even smaller or no longer exists, and the whole monetary price will be paid by the upper class and business.
Hey, republicans. Don't you care about what a huge and costly maintenance deficit you're leaving to your children?