Friends, progressives, Democrats, Americans, our nation is facing an unprecedented crisis. This crisis is made up of a few little crises, which are converging and have the potential to permanently cripple America. These little crises fall under three headings... fiscal, global, and political. Each of these crises, taken in isolation, could hurt American power, but, taken in combination, they have the potential to bring chaos, disorder, and untold misery to the human race.

The first of these crises is the fiscal one. The Bush administration, following Grover Norquist's edict to "starve the beast," created this crisis. In 2000, they cut taxes in an attempt to force the federal government to shrink through starvation of funds. Their political calculus said that the best way to fulfill their hidden agenda of shrinking government was to cause a fiscal crisis and then simply respond to the groundswell of public outrage by cutting government services.

There are a couple problems with this and they are at the center of the crisis:

First, people actually do need government services. When it comes to disaster response, defense, healthcare, retirement, etc., Americans depend on the federal government to provide services more cost efficiently and more effectively than they could do themselves. Taking away these services doesn't magically make the needs go away, it just forces individuals and local governments to pick up the slack or go without. In former case, the cost of these services is shifted away from the federal government, but society pays a higher cost than before, because states and individuals simply don't have the same economies of scale on their side as the fed does. In other words, cutting federal services leads to higher local taxes and to individuals overpaying for something the fed can buy for them cheaper. In the latter case, removing the service just causes harm to society. If you take away education funding, does it really do anything to improve education? If you take away healthcare for the poor, do they stop being sick? And if you take away federal disaster relief, doesn't it just make a disaster worse? Cutting government services creates a larger burden for our society, not a smaller one.

Second, deficit spending worries people. They know they will eventually have to pay the bill in the form of higher taxes or else watch their country go bankrupt. Worried people take fewer risks. One of the hallmarks of our economic growth in the 1990s was people's willingness to strike out on their own and create not only new businesses, but entirely new ways of making money... like eBay or Amazon. One of the reasons the 2000s have not had the sort of frenzied, ecstatic growth we saw in the 1990s is that people are being more cautious. And the main reason people are being more cautious, in my view, is that they worry about the future and their financial place in it. Just as bad, people who are still willing to take a risk have to compete with the fed for investment capital, so the opportunity to start a new business lessens. So, the federal deficit burdens and stagnates the economy, taking opportunity away from Americans.

Third, the whole concept of small government, low taxes, and less regulation derives from Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism holds that human societies work best when the "strongest," unencumbered by government interference in the form of regulation, welfare, and progressive taxation, are allowed to out-compete and dominate the "weakest." On the surface, that doesn't sound so bad to some. That's just free market economics, right? But if you dig beneath the surface, there are some real problems with that view. Unlike the laws of nature, the laws of human society change, so "strong" and "weak" are a reflection of the values of a society at a given time. Simply put, does being born wealthy actually make you a better person? And does society benefit from letting you dominate other, less wealthy, people? The Republicans' policy of concentrating wealth and power into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful supports their hidden, Social Darwinist, agenda. Scarier still, Social Darwinism was the well-spring of Fascism and Nazism. After all, if the "strong" and entitled to dominate the "weak," how can you have democracy? How can people be equal under the law or anywhere else? And, if some people aren't equals, why even bother calling them human... perhaps they are less than human?

Fourth, a "starved beast" isn't able to respond to the unexpected. One of the reasons we have government in the first place is that unexpected stuff happens and it's easiest to respond if you already have a command structure in-place. FEMA's failure to respond effectively to hurricane Katrina stemmed from its being starved. The agency had been de-funded and stripped of its experienced professionals long before Katrina struck. The fact that the Louisiana government had neglected disaster preparedness shouldn't distract us from the reality that the fed, better placed to provide immediate and cost-effective disaster relief for all states, failed to act. That failure to act is a direct consequence of "starving the beast."

Finally, a "starved beast" loses its willingness to address problems before they explode into full-blown crises. Right now, our "free market" healthcare system is in a death spiral. Free market forces and anti-competitive practices are driving up the cost of healthcare to the point where most people can no longer afford it. Our government and people can't and won't act to fix the situation because of the perception that "we simply can't afford it." The situation is only getting worse and the options for fixing it are getting fewer and costlier by the day. It's like not having enough money to get your car fixed and then not being able to get to work once it finally dies.

In the big picture, our fiscal crisis promises to reshape the country in ways few Americans will like. It will cause the federal government to continue passing the costs onto local governments and individuals at GREATER expense to all. It will sap the vitality and growth out of our economy by dissuading the next Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from trying to build something new. It will concentrate wealth in the hands of the very few AND tell them they are entitled to treat the weak as less than completely human. It will amplify the negative effects of unexpected disasters. And it will cause us to ignore problems until they're too big and too costly to fix. There are many countries in the world that experience the conditions listed above. My question is why are using Mexico as our model for good government?