Bankrupting the federal government?

Jean also points me to this article about taxpayers likelihood of paying for corporate toxic messes.


There is, however, a second category: sites whose ownership has changed many times over the years, or whose owners have gone bankrupt. For these sites, Superfund's architects created an "orphan" fund, to be financed by excise taxes on the oil and chemical industries and by a tiny environmental income tax levied on most other corporations. These taxes expired in 1995, when Congressional Republicans refused to renew them. President Bush has not asked for their reinstatement, the first president not to do so. The orphan fund is down to its last few million dollars and is likely to run dry next year. It will then be entirely dependent on general revenues.

The administration says it does not matter who pays to clean up the orphan sites...Instead of having a steady source of guaranteed income, the fund will have to compete with every other program at a time when federal dollars are increasingly scarce. And because polluting industries no longer have to contribute, the orphan fund loses whatever value it has had as a deterrent to bad behavior by industry and as an incentive to develop more benign chemicals and manufacturing processes.

Now, this idea of running out of federal monies brings me to another piece of forwarded mail I received yesterday from my friend Jody in Honolulu: Bill Moyers' interview with Joe Hough.

Bill Moyers talks to Joseph C. Hough on the intersection of politics and religion, and why he thinks it is the duty of Christians, Jews and Muslims to join to fight growing economic inequality, why he’s critical of how some political pundits are using Christianity to justify their actions, and why he suspects that the time for a non-destructive, civil disobedience may be near....Joseph C. Hough, former dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, is currently President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary.

MOYERS: You recently did a very radical thing. You called on the children of Abraham — Muslims, Christians and Jews — to engage in an act of refusal.

HOUGH: Well, my perception, Bill, is that there is a definite intentional move on the part of political leadership in this country. In the direction that I think is not at all compatible with the prophetic tradition in Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. And that is the obligation on the part of people who believe in God to care for the least and the poorest. That central teaching, that sacred code, I think, is very well summed up in Proverbs where the writer of Proverbs says, "Those who oppress the needy insult their maker." "Those who oppress the needy insult their maker."

And I think that it would be a wonderful thing if we could stand together, these three great Abrahamic traditions, and say, "Look, we do not countenance this sort of thing. It is not only unfair, it is immoral on the basis of our religious traditions, and we believe it's an insult to God."

MOYERS: And "it" is what?

HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do.

MOYERS: We've all heard this from economists.

HOUGH: Yes.

MOYERS: And political pundits, and analysts, think tank experts. But we're hearing this from the president of a seminary?

HOUGH: Yeah. You are.

I guess that leaves me with all kinds of questions (and I'm sure you could come up with many more) about bankrupting the federal government. I can see how that might appeal to anti-government and states' rights types. But somehow I don't think they've thought it through if that's their intention.

That's not the first time I've heard about this idea of intentionally bankrupting the federal government. It's just that I've always kind of dismissed it as the paranoid rantings of conspiracy theorists. (Yes, me! In the words of a Lizzie West song: If it's all the same to you, old dame, I'll call that kettle black.) I'm not sure I can put Joe Hough in the ranting conspiracy theory category.


....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.