“Why We’re Fasting,” tops one column of the New York Times oped page today. Something about Lent? Nope, although there is a religious angle. In an odd alliance, Mark Bittman, the NYT‘s food critic, writes that he and Rev. David Beckmann of Bread for the World are on a temporary hunger strike to protest federal budget cuts aimed at food programs:
These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.
… This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document. We can take care of the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our safety net by reducing military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich. Or we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?
Bittman seems a tad uncomfortable in his alliance with progressive Christians, concluding that “If faith increases your motivation, that’s great, but I doubt God will intervene here.” But the clerics make a convincing case, as it turns out.
However blind their rhetoric about starvation may be to alternatives that don’t include state intervention — the $30 billion Gates Foundation might be a start — Bittman and his progressive Christian allies are right about one thing: increasing defense spending in a time of supposed austerity makes the GOP look ridiculous. As Jim Wallis told Time,
If this was really about fiscal responsibility, they’d go where the money was… Every day we’re spending more in Libya than everything we’d like to keep in the budget. That’s turning around the Biblical imperatives and beating your plowshares into swords. You’re not going to solve the deficit with these programs. This is just mean. This is not believing the government should help poor people as a principle.
Whether or not you agree that Biblical imperatives compel Big State intervention, Wallis is right to point to the hypocrisy in the GOP’s ideological attachment to high defense spending and the costs of military intervention abroad. Republicans should stop giving progressives red meat by supporting expensive interventions of one kind over another. Conservatives should step back and reconsider the impact of all interventions led by the state–and then we can have a reasonable discussion about the best way to feed the poor, both at home and abroad.
Andy 
Young Geezer 
Good essay Lewis McCrary. Let me extend the discussion.
Current Republican dogma is to overfeed the insatiable War Machine, but tell every domestic social program to pound sand when addressing the deficit. Movement Republicans are economically Darwinian in every respect except maintaining the Empire Project.
There is indeed tons of wasteful domestic spending that could be curtailed. However islands of social pathology and dysfunction appear in the United States that are beyond the capacities of local governments to address. They are like natural disasters in their impact only occur slowly over time.
True natural disaster areas are granted federal support without argument. The depopulation of Detroit or the homeless mentally ill aggregating in urban areas are equivalent social disasters in which mainstream Conservatives offer nothing more than condemnation of prior Liberal programs as they escape to the exurbs.
However, Mayor Bing in Detroit or the director of Catholic Charities in DC have to play crummy hands no matter how the game was played years ago. They now own the problems. The normative Conservative response is “tough beans”, while advocating for even more tax dollars for Lockheed Martin.
Compassionate Conservatism was a failure because it conflated “nice to have” spending with spending requirements needed to address profound dysfunction. I am hoping that “Traditional” Conservatives are not so stark in their condemnation of all social spending. I agree that federal spending for local parks, or arcane research at State universities or Lawrence Welk museums makes no sense. If the States want “nice to have” programs, let them pay for them with local tax dollars.
But I also know that the cost of 1 round of Tomahawks lobbed into Libya could have supported a lot of programs that alleviate real pain on the domestic side for years.
That is spending the NeoCons would abhor. From their PoV, about social programs, there is nothing to discuss.