Selective Deficit Disorder

Watching the
health care debate unfold these days is a little like watching scenes
from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"--the ones showing a collage of
strung-out, deranged or otherwise incapacitated patients rotting away
in a squalid psychiatric ward.

As the insurance industry's Nurse Ratched lurks in the background,
congressional Democrats cower in the corner, fearing the phantom menace
of their own shadows. Standing next to the window, suicidal Republican
leaders rant about "death panels" and threaten to splatter their
electoral prospects onto the pavement below. Nearby, White House
officials struggle with multiple-personality ailments as they mumble
contradictory statements about the public option. Meanwhile, tea party
protesters lie on the floor in the fetal position, soiling their
hospital diapers as they throw incoherent tantrums about everything
from socialism to communism to czarism to Nazism. And, not
surprisingly, Washington reporters just stare off into the distance,
having been long ago lobotomized in the wake of their Watergate heyday.

Clearly, the inmates in America's political sanitarium are each
struggling with a different malady. However, they are all suffering
from Selective Deficit Disorder--an illness whose symptoms can be
particularly difficult to detect.

When we see tea party activists bemoan deficit spending or watch
rank-and-file senators like Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., say, "I'm not
going to vote for a [health care] bill that's not deficit-neutral," it
is easy to think these poor souls are perfectly healthy. When President
Barack Obama promises to "not sign a [health] plan that adds one dime
to our deficit" and then New York Times writers such as David Brooks
praise this "dime standard" as the epitome of "pragmatism" and "fiscal
sanity," these victims seem absolutely sane.

Yet, Selective Deficit Disorder is a sickness of omission. Attacking
the neural synapses that maintain rudimentary logic, it presents itself
not in what its carriers say and do, but in what they refuse to say and
do.

Where, for instance, were the conservative protest marchers when
President George W. Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive
tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Sen. Lincoln's concern for "deficit
neutrality" when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall
Street? Where was Obama's "dime standard" when he proposed a budget
that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on
any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where
were demands for "fiscal sanity" by Brooks and other right-wing pundits
when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were the
calls from these supposed "deficit hawks" to raise taxes when they
backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists
asking such painfully simple questions?

They were nowhere to be seen or heard, because those plagued by
Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively
worried about deficits.

When it comes to spending on priorities like health care reform that
would help ordinary Americans, the illness' victims scream about
deficits and overspending. But when it comes to handing over trillions
of dollars to financial firms, defense contractors and other corporate
interests, deficits suddenly don't matter to the disease-addled
politicians, protesters and journalists underwritten by those interests.

Luckily, while almost every significant voice in politics is
stricken with Selective Deficit Disorder, the majority of the country's
citizens are not. That doesn't mean Americans love unbalanced budgets,
of course. It just means we know there is something very wrong with
those who decry deficit spending on health care for millions of people,
but ignore far bigger deficit expenditures on giveaways to a tiny
handful of fat cats.

Now, all we have to do is stop flying over the cuckoo's nest and start breaking into the asylum...