srib: From huddled masses

[question everything]

From huddled masses

(snip)


In her book, "The Roosevelt I Knew," Perkins summed up her view of social justice: "Out of our first century of national life we evolved the ethical principle that it was not right or just that an honest and industrious man should live and die in misery. He was entitled to some degree of sympathy and security. Our conscience declared against the honest workman's becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that he very often did."

To a very great degree, American government did what Perkins believed it should. From the enacting of all the reforms of the 1930s and 1940s through the Great Society and War on Poverty, America the land of immigrants saw the rise of a prosperous middle class such as the world had never seen.

Now, however, a movement is afoot to undo most of the reforms that sprang from the settlement house movement. Its proponents don't seek to tweak the social-welfare system or curb its excesses. They seek to obliterate it.

The budget deficits and tax cuts have a purpose: It's called "starve the beast." You can see it in the budgets in St. Paul, and you can see it in the budgets in Washington. They want to defund public education, wreck Medicaid and gut environmental regulation. They want to deregulate business back to the days of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire. They want the wealthy to keep their wealth instead of paying a fair share into state and federal taxes. They want to destroy Social Security. They want "faith-based" initiatives to replace secular, government social-welfare programs. In essence, they wish to repeal the 20th century and return us to the individualism of the frontier days and the robber-baron era, when the poor and the newly arrived were looked down upon and when there was a quite small middle class.

(snip)

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5249363.html

Jim Boyd is the Star Tribune's deputy editorial page editor. He can be reached at [e-mail].