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In trying to come up with justifications for opposing federal aid to states and cities, Republican leaders like President Trump and Majority Leader McConnell have painted a picture of blue-state profligacy. As they can’t very well say they’re indulging in partisan spite and attempting to weaken politically potent public-sector unions before November’s election, they focus instead on the need for fiscal discipline, at both the state and federal levels of government.
“My guess is their [the blue states’] first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now,” McConnell told a right-wing talk show host.
To call Republicans’ invocations of fiscal rectitude selective is, of course, to understate. Republicans have not hesitated to send billions of dollars to major corporations that squandered their revenues on dividend payments and share buybacks, rather than pay their workers adequately or establish a modestly sufficient rainy-day fund. For that matter, it was barely two years ago that Republicans swelled the federal deficit with their $1.7 trillion tax cut, 83 percent of which went to America’s most wealthy. Their concern about “borrow[ing] money from future generations,” the vast majority of whom would not be wealthy, to reward their wealthy contributors was nowhere in evidence.
Neither Trump nor McConnell is big on self-reflection, much less poetry, but a line from The Waste Land presents a question they might ask themselves before they rail about the funds that blue states spend on such frivolities as schools and public health:
Shall I at least set my lands in order?