Don't Put Vulnerable On Economic Front Line

By: Max J. Castro

It has been said so many times that this war is different that it has become a cliché. But there's one way in which this war is unique that isn't discussed enough. This is a war in which there are likely to be more American casualties on the home front than on the battle front, and not just the victims of terrorism. There will be a predictable human toll from the economic fallout and how we are handling it.

Our most recent major wars - World War II, Korea, Vietnam - extracted an awful human cost on the battlefield that, thankfully, is unlikely to be repeated in this conflict. Yet these previous wars were accompanied by a sharing of sacrifice and an expansion of social justice at home through programs like the G.I. Bill and the Great Society. Women and minorities were brought into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. There was a sense that, if we were fighting for justice in the world, we had to ensure justice at home.

Nothing in the way of an expansion of social justice or economic opportunity is visible today. This may be our first war that leads to the expansion of existing inequalities. The stock market is up again, but the labor market is way down. Those who work for their money are not doing well. Those whose money works for them are doing all right.

Government isn't helping things. At the federal level, the administration continues to fight for an economic stimulus package based on the trickle-down theory that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy helps everybody. In the state of Florida, the Legislature and governor chose to balance the budget by cutting education and programs for the poor rather than closing the huge and sometimes absurd loopholes in the state's tax system, including an exemption for the raising of ostriches. We don't send the vulnerable - pregnant women, the elderly or the sick - to the battlefield. So why make the least able to afford it bear such a heavy burden on the economic front?

The fact that this war is being fought under a Republican administration is only part of the answer. More important, this is the first big war - I don't consider the Gulf War in this category - we have fought in the post-Reagan era, which saw the triumph of the so-called conservative philosophy. It's a philosophy that holds that the market is God.

That is never stated. But in this view, the market is perfect, its outcomes fair by definition, any meddling in its mechanism folly or heresy. Can anything other than a divine being fit this description? Yet, from this assumption of market moral and practical infallibility is derived an implicit divine right for the rich to get richer and for the rest to fend for themselves.

But the market is not God. It is full of imperfections. It is indispensable, but it also often produces unjust and inefficient results.

During a time of national emergency, when we must all pull together, it is the role of government to right these wrongs, not to exacerbate them by putting women and children on the front lines of the economic battle.