Those who don’t like socialism should stop cashing their Social Security checks and should burn their Medicare cards. America needs to figure out that government isn’t the problem; it’s the solution staring at us. But that takes trust.
Low social trust in America can be attributed to income inequality and the decline in social mobility. Trust among people and trust in the government disappears as societies become divided between haves and have-nots.
For decades, Republicans have used distrust to promote their small-government agenda. They have a seemingly religious belief in capitalism’s private sector and want to purge the rottenness out of our so-called big government by destroying Social Security, Medicare, and other federal safety net programs.
This Republican tough-love economics is late-19th-century social Darwinism, where people are forced to live with the consequences of whatever happens to them. Only the fittest should survive, and any effort to save the least fit will undermine the moral fiber of society.
Apparently, Republicans think that cutting benefits and privatized for-profit social programs will purge the rottenness out of the federal system and lead to moral clarity. Instead, it purges that very morality out of the system, leaving the American people even further behind.