G.O.P.'s taking the nation down!!!

The Herald, on budget hearings in Miami-Dade, in which it is reported that no one-- especially not county commissioners-- are taking a pay cut during this next leg of the Great Recesssion-- is oddly discordant with the latest Republican Pledge to shrink the size of government come what may. I don't believe that the G.O.P. has an iota of interest in doing anything other than regaining control of Congress and will tell voters anything, anything at all.

In the New York Times (reprinted, below), Nobel laureate Paul Krugman takes on the nonsense. But before reading, you might consider the more sinister aspect of the GOP plan that took flight after 9/11: the massive expansion of government through "privatization" of national security. This proof of GOP capacity to protect individual liberties was recently detailed in the Washington Post and, then, in the New Yorker. Here is an excerpt of what the party of less government brought Americans:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

It is true that American voters today are an angry lot. They are angry mainly because the American Dream has broken apart and no one seems to know what it will take to fix it. Will voters act on this "new" Republican Pledge? Past performance does count. Before that GOP pledge works, let's see if the Republican members of the Miami-Dade county commission agree to take a haircut of their office budgets and perks, equivalent to the lost value of our houses and condos. Krugman says the nation is en route to becoming a banana republic. We know.