Drowning the beast.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Emergency preparedness funding

For years, Republicans and rightwingers have been selling the notion that taxes are bad, and cuts in government services are good. Now comes the deluge in New Orleans, and the Bush Administration's appalling inability to save thousands of Americans from the horror that unfolded there.

The pictures and news reports were unbelievable--people waiting, starving and dehydrated, fending off the looters and the thugs as a convention center and a famous football stadium became death traps. The elderly slumped on baggage carousels at the airport--some dead, some dying. The contrast between the enormous wealth of our country, with its massive stadiums and transportation infrastructure, and the desperate human suffering, the collapse of civilization and humanity in New Orleans, made a shocking picture.

Is this the vision of America the anti-government ideologues have in mind? The wealthy buy their way out of trouble when disaster strikes, and the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the weak are left in the direst of circumstances?

If Americans woke up to see our country looking like the most afflicted of Third World nations, it's no accident that it happened on the watch of an Administration that has determinedly cut spending on social services and infrastructure. The Bush Administration denied the Army Corps of Engineers request for $105 million for hurricane and flood protection for New Orleans last year--cutting it down to about 40 percent, leaving the levees that burst unrepaired because they didn't want to spend the money to get the job done. And this same Administration decided to try to make its tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens permanent, even as New Orleans drowned and Baghdad burned.

In the 1980s, they started using the phrase "starve the beast" to describe a deliberate effort to drive up deficits through tax cuts so that the government can no longer afford to maintain many federal programs. The goal, in Grover Norquist's memorable phrase, is to "get the federal government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

These starving and drowning metaphors should give Americans pause as we look at New Orleans. The real human cost of the dismantling of civil society has been on graphic display there.

By siphoning money away from emergency relief, sending 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard to tend to Bush's folly in Iraq, remaking "Homeland Security" so its focus is on high-profile military and anti-terrorist missions, Bush...