October is zombie season.
Even now there are zombies wandering around campus, as the semi-annual BG Undead game gets underway. As I write, there are already 28 zombies on campus, not counting [INSERT JOKE HERE, e.g. “your ex” or “your teacher”].
The number will be higher by the time you read this. Those interested can track the game’s progress on the BG Undead site (www.bgundead.com). Keep your Nerf rifle close and walk warily.
Unfortunately, there are zombies abroad in the national landscape who can’t be put out of action by something as simple and ordinary as a crossbow loaded with neon-bright Nerf bolts.
Zombie ideas are shambling through our country, putting the bite on our economy, killing jobs, hopes and dreams.
Worst of all may be the “trickle-down” theory of economic growth: that if we cut taxes for the richest so-called “job-creating” class, their prosperity will trickle down through the economy and everyone will get some. Unfortunately money, unlike water, does not run downhill.
The “trickle-down” theory has been tested and proven disastrous on at least three occasions: under the Hoover administration, right before the Great Depression; under Reagan, whose administration began the era of massive deficits we still live with; and under George W. Bush, our most fiscally irresponsible president to date and the architect of our current economic mess.
In the wake of this evidence that tax cuts for the rich do not produce jobs for everybody, you might think both political parties, to save their political skins, would be pursuing new ideas that have some slight chance of actually working-particularly as the country is now undergoing the worst long-term economic downturn since the 1930s.
But that’s just crazy talk. Scan through the records of any of the 15,000 Republican presidential debates (so far), and all you will see is talk of tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for everyone else. Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have all proposed tax increases-but not on the rich. Instead, they plan to tax the poorest Americans. Cain’s “9-9-9” proposal is the boldest yet: it would raise taxes on most Americans so that the richest few can receive yet another massive tax cut.
The Democrats have not done much better. The president’s economic advisers and the Senate Democratic leaders seem to be as much a prisoner of Wall Street’s zombie ideology as the national Republicans, or Ohio’s own Governor Kasich (part of the crew who ran the Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers onto the rocks).
But the fight against the zombie ideas goes on: outside the two major parties and against them. The Occupy Wall Street protests that have spread across America and over the world are a sign that most people are still uninfected by the virus of zombie ideas.
Protesting is good. But voting is even better: it’s time to start voting against the anti-union, anti-community, anti-rational laws of the zombie economists – and against the politicians who support them, Republican or Democrat.
If politicians realize that their jobs depend on it, they might start looking out for the rest of us as well as they have for the richest 1 percent, and the 99 percent will get some real representation in our government.
Then we can banish the nightmare of zombie economics and get back to building the American Dream.
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