Old White Men in Suits and the Unfortunate Suckiness of Things

Discussing different groups of frightening people with my students the other day, I came to the conclusion that Old White Men in Suits were the scariest of all. Unless you are one of those, just ask yourself, do old white men in suits have your best interests at heart? I mean ever?

Unfortunately, I realized that I'd herded most politicians and especially Republican politicians into a neat little group. And even more unfortunately, these people have an inordinate amount of control over our lives, and they certainly do not have our best interests at heart.

The current sad state of publicly owned and run things was set in motion by white man in suit in sheep's clothing Ronald Reagan, who famously stated the government isn't the solution, government is the problem. I agree that the government is nothing but trouble in some instances, but it can be extremely helpful in others (Social Security, Medicare, roads, etc.) and to lump it all together in the "bad" pile is flat out wrong. It has also started a push by these men for a whole bunch of things that have made our lives worse.

It's hard to settle on one example, but to pick one that's easy to oversimplify for narrative purposes, let's talk about the Post Office. The Post Office has never been a shining beacon of high performance anyway, but for the last couple of decades it's being slowly starved to death. Here's how it works:

1. Politicians, again, this is particularly Republicans, though some Democrats go along, state that the Post Office, being part of the government, is bad.

2. Because the goal of Republicans is to prove that government can't do anything right, rather than invest money in trying to improve the Post Office, they begin to drain it of money, because who can support funding something that's "bad?"

3. Every year, the Post Office asks for a certain amount of money, including a chunk to improve their facilities and operations. The congressmen in charge of this sort of thing, who get lots of campaign contributions from companies that compete with the Post Office for business, like UPS and FedEx, rather than go along or suggest further improvements, set a funding level maybe close to but somewhat below the minimum level necessary to keep the Post Office healthy and solvent.

4. The Post Office, whose operations are constrained by these congressmen as well (for example, can't raise prices, have to deliver junk mail on Saturday, and do other things that lose money), have no choice but to limit the quality of service they deliver. Shorter hours, few people at the service window, anything they can control to cut costs.

5. Service gradually gets worse, and they continue to lose money. The congressional funders say "We can't be giving full support to an organization that can't balance it's budget," ignoring the fact that they set up the budget parameters in a way that guaranteed failure. So they cut the budget more, and so on. The Post Office continues to decline, to this day.

There are plenty of other examples of this- Amtrak, public schools, public transit, roads and bridges, municipal services like sanitation. The hope for these people is that these government services simply shrink up and die. It's systematic, and they've been working at it for years and are very good at it. So they've won the battle for the past 25 years. But the war isn't over yet.

We still have the opportunity to throw these guys out on the street and elect people who are committed to having the government do the part of its job that's to the direct benefit of the population at large, rather than the big money campaign contributors. It's going to be a long fight, but it's worth it for anyone not satisfied with the current suckiness of things.