Flint Michigan teaches us about the parties

So, the collective outrage of millions has been activated and people are shocked, SHOCKED that unelected Republican leaders in Flint, Michigan knowing switched to a toxic water supply in order to save some money.  Who could have forecast that putting Republicans in charge of the health and welfare of 100,000 low income African Americans could have turned out so tragically?

Semantics and philosophy aside, Flint demonstrates the two biggest problems with putting today’s Republican party in charge of any government, local, state or federal.  The first is that Republicans will always grasp at any plan that purports to save taxpayers money, ignoring any tiny details that would lead a logical person to believe the plan was nuts.

Back in the 1980’s the Reagan administration had a plan to save taxpayers millions of dollars: they could fire all those pesky bureaucrats who oversaw the savings and loan industry.  Fewer bureaucrats in Washington; the banking industry free to innovate and make America strong again.  What could go wrong?  Well, anyone with common sense would have pointed out that the savings and loan industry were a bunch of rich yahoo playing with other people’s money, and that they could speculate in any nutty scheme and keep the profits if it paid off while getting bailed out if it failed.  The result of the GOP’s penny-pinching?  The plan to save taxpayers a few million dollars a year ended up costing taxpayers $160 billion.

In Flint, the plan to switch to a different water supply was supposed to save taxpayers $19 million over eight years.  The Michigan governor has proposed that the state will spend $28 million to fix the problem.  Once again the GOP plan to save money is penny-wise and pound foolish and will end up costing taxpayers more.  No doubt the governor will eventually use the “unexpected” cost as an excuse for cutting spending on social services.  Maybe he’ll suggest raising taxes on the rich, but I’m not holding my breath.

The second GOP problem in governing is the ingrained belief that the government CANNOT help people, and any attempt to help people will make them worse off.  In any sane person, the prospect of thousands of people drinking toxic water supplied by the government would have triggered an immediate, “Oh my god, we’ve got to do something!” response.  But these were Republicans, and so instead of bursting into immediate action (as Republican icon Teddy Roosevelt would have done) they dragged their feet, assuring everyone that nothing was wrong and insisting things were fine in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence (*cough*globalwarming*cough*).

The EPA found that the water coming out of Flint taps contained 13,200 parts of lead per billion; the acceptable level was 15.  So it wasn’t really a close call.  Yet the Michigan department of environmental quality contended that the EPA measurement was wrong because the tap they used had a filter, which is a strange claim given that a) the tap was taken off during the test; b) the filter would have reduced contamination, not increased it, and c) presumably the EPA knows a little something about testing water (distrusting all government functionaries is another GOP failing). 

The administration of Dubya was going fine until Katrina hit New Orleans.  It was Bush’s congratulatory “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” to disaster Czar Michael Brown that was the “Emperor has no clothes” reveal for the Dubya administration.  Brownie hadn’t been doing a heck of a job; he’d been doing almost no job at all.  But the Republican administration looked out and saw, not people in need, but a bunch of moochers who wanted government largesse because of some random event.  Brown’s inadequate response, with an inadequate price tag, was just what Dubya and his advisers wanted, not a well-designed, adequate and expensive response to a national catastrophe.

The Democratic and Republican parties can debate back and forth about how the nation should be governed, but the bottom line is that the Republicans don’t want to govern it.  They want the free market to run free, and if Flint’s water is toxic then the free market response is to buy bottled water at the store.  Why should government provide safe water to residents for free anyway? 

All the high-falutin’ philosophy of the two parties is mostly irrelevant.  What matters is which party seeking to govern actually wants to, and which just wants to sit back and let the campaign contributions keep rolling in.  All the punditry in the world is irrelevant when there is a natural disaster, or a man-made one.  If an emergency happens where you live, do you want the director of emergency services to be a Democrat or Republican?  I know who I’d trust more.