David McElroy

Republicans in Congress talk big about cutting spending. They rail against the ridiculous pork that they’re going to cut from the budget. But when it’s time to put their words into action, these budget hawks become gentle as doves. The spending never stops.

It happened again Tuesday. Republicans in the U.S. Senate had a chance to show they were serious about cutting spending — in at least a small way. Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute points out that 32 Republican senators voted against cutting $1 billion in rural development subsidies. (If you’re in the United States, check here to see how your senators voted. Both of the chicken hawks from my state voted against the cuts.)

So if Republicans won’t even cut some money out of the budget that includes the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center, what cuts are they willing to make? It’s time to be painfully blunt. Republicans are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. Democrats are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. In other words, everybody is interested in keeping interest groups happy. Hardly anybody really cares about fixing the budget and the debt.

(If you’d like to know what those rural development subsides are used for, Cato had a great paper a couple of years ago that explains it nicely.)

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As a California state assemblywoman, Mary Hayashi is accustomed to taking things from people and companies because she wants to. She apparently just forgot that she had to get the rest of the Legislature to approve of the theft before she did it.

The Castro Valley Democrat came into a San Francisco Neiman Marcus store with two shopping bags, one from Neiman Marcus and one from another store. She picked up $2,500 worth of merchandise and left the store — passing multiple checkout registers along the way. Store security watched and recorded on video — and then confronted her after she left the store. San Francisco police arrested Hayashi and she’s charged with felony grand theft.

A spokeswoman for Hayashi says it’s all just a misunderstanding, of course. She said Hayashi was talking on her cell phone and simply left the store “without really thinking about it.”

Hayashi is part of an institution whose members simply take what they want from others and give those things to pretty much anyone they want. It’s an institution that believes it has the moral right to control people’s lives and take their property without compensation. My experience with politicians who have that kind of power get pretty arrogant about what they can have when they want it. My suspicion is that she thought she was entitled to the “five-finger discount.”

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Barack Obama acts as though he believes he’s auditioning for a role as Franklin Roosevelt during the 1936 campaign. Given the high degree of economic ignorance in the country today, it’s not surprising that people don’t know to be scared of repeating this ugly history.

Think about this scenario. A Democratic president is finishing his first term. He inherited a serious economic downturn that he blames on his Republican predecessor. In his first four years, he’s gotten sweeping social legislation passed that will radically affect the lives of Americans and major sectors of the economy. This legislation extended federal power in unprecedented ways. Republicans vowed that they shared the same goals, but didn’t want to go as far and wanted to roll back some of the programs. The economy isn’t turning around fast enough, so the president wants to raise taxes on “the rich” to pay for his programs to create jobs, which he claims are ending the economic downturn.

So which did I just describe? FDR in ’36? Or Obama in ’12? The answer, of course, is that it’s both. The parallels between the 1936 election and the 2012 election are a bit scary if you think about them.

Listen to a Roosevelt campaign speech from the days leading up to the November 1936 election. This link will play audio of a speech in Massachusetts in late October 1936. (It’s the link on the left side of the page.) Roosevelt talked of “fairness” in taxation, in much the same ways that Obama does today. FDR engaged in the same kind of class warfare to win re-election that Obama is trying to play today.

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