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" Let&amp;#039;s review, shall we? 1. The deficit is huge and frightening, sparking a national movement called &amp;quot;tea parties&amp;quot; that protest &amp;quot;big government.&amp;quot; 2. Health care reform will reduce the deficit by about $116 billion dollars in just the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which produces the numbers on which both parties rely. It will also insure more than 30 million people and stop insurance companies from refusing insurance to people who are or might be sick. 3. If we don&amp;#039;t pass health care reform, things will get much, much worse \u2014 by 2030, for example, Medicare and Medicaid alone will eat up one-third of the entire budget. That means revolutionary changes, folks. This article from the Center for American Progress lays out the options with admirable clarity: &amp;quot;In order to get to a balanced budget in 2025 without health care reform, all other federal spending would have to be reduced by 56 percent. That means Social Security benefits would need to be cut in half, as would spending on national defense, on veterans&amp;#039; benefits, on homeland security, on education, and on everything else.&amp;quot;  Those are the facts. The people who are suspicious about big government and big business \u2014 I&amp;#039;m talking to you, Tea Parties of America \u2014 need to wake up. You are being manipulated by powerful people who don&amp;#039;t give a damn about the long-term welfare of this country. Right now, millions and millions of dollars are being spent by propaganda groups that want to confuse you. Don&amp;#039;t be suckers. Here&amp;#039;s another lie that we are being fed these days: the idea that the real America is a place where freedom is the only value, where each rugged individual should rely on himself alone. This is the idea behind the cries of socialism. It is the idea behind the claims that the American Constitution gives the government no authority to regulate health care, an argument that has spread from fringe revolutionaries in the &amp;quot;Patriot&amp;quot; militias  to the Wall Street Journal. It is the idea behind Glenn Beck&amp;#039;s spectacularly bizarre attack on Christianity itself last week, when he told his viewers that the words &amp;quot;social justice&amp;quot; were code for communism and Nazism \u2014 never mind all that corny stuff in the Bible like &amp;quot;what you have done for the least of my brethren, you have done it for me&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;one who is gracious to the poor man lends to the Lord.&amp;quot; But in fact, selfishness is not the American Way, and never has been. Way back in colonial times, Americans spent between &amp;quot;10 and 35 percent of all municipal funds&amp;quot; on what was then called &amp;quot;relief,&amp;quot; according to Walter I. Trattner&amp;#039;s standard textbook on the subject, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. Aid to the poor and sick was the largest single government expense, providing crucial sustenance to the widows and orphans of the Indian wars, the survivors of epidemics, starving immigrants, and a surprising number of abandoned bastard children (during the Revolutionary era, between a third and 50 percent of all first children were illegitimate \u2014 take that, nostalgists of family values!). Prodded by the spiritual zeal of the Great Awakening and Enlightenment ideas about progress, the years leading up to our revolution were celebrated as an age of both public and private humanitarianism, a spirit captured in this letter General George Washington wrote to his estate manager in 1775: &amp;quot;Let the hospitality of the house, with respect to the poor, be kept up. Let no man go away hungry.&amp;quot; The American Revolution only intensified these generous sentiments, Trattner explains:  The Declaration of Independence, with its emphasis upon reason and human equality, naturally tended to call attention to the need to improve the common person&amp;#039;s lot. Independence in the New World, where resources were abundant, offered Americans the opportunity, if not the obligation, to root out old errors and vices and erect a society which would be a beacon to the world. At the very least, if the independent republican and democratic rule were to endure, American citizens had to be exempt from such impediments as illiteracy, poverty and distress to cast their ballots freely and rationally.  As the &amp;quot;can-do&amp;quot; spirit set the nation on fire to build that shining city on the hill, the state &amp;quot;became an instrument for advancing the welfare of the entire population.&amp;quot; Government offices like the Committee on the Superintendents of the Poor were established to care for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally ill.  There were countervailing forces, to be sure. The opening of the frontier encouraged the lone-cowboy individualism that still inspires so many Americans. The rise of Adam Smith&amp;#039;s ideas about capitalism&amp;#039;s invisible hand had a big impact, kicking off the much-too-convenient idea that &amp;quot;greed is good.&amp;quot; So did Malthusian ideas about overpopulation, which got mixed up with Enlightenment ideas about the perfectibility of human nature in a particularly toxic way \u2014 since suffering wasn&amp;#039;t seen as part of God&amp;#039;s plan anymore, people convinced themselves that the poor were poor because they lacked moral character and therefore didn&amp;#039;t deserve compassion. An American disciple of Smith named Nathaniel Ware made the argument succinctly: &amp;quot;Humanity aside, it would be best interest of society to kill all such drones.&amp;quot; (Just last month, the Lt. Governor of South Carolina, a Republican named Andre Bauer, said much the same during a discussion of food stamps and public housing: &amp;quot;My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;) In the 1820s, Americans began an experiment with &amp;quot;indoor relief&amp;quot; \u2014 building poorhouses. But as the idea that the poor deserved to suffer took hold, it became easier for people to argue against the taxes that were necessary to support them, so they quickly became as ugly as anything in the work of Charles Dickens. Here&amp;#039;s how the New York State legislature summed it up in a report released during the 1850s:  It is much to be regretted that our citizens manifest so little interest in the condition even of those in their immediate neighborhood. Individuals who take great interest in human suffering whenever it is brought to their notice, never visit them, and are entirely uninformed, that in a county house almost at their own doors, may be found the lunatic suffering for years in a dark and suffocating cell in summer, and almost freezing the winter \u2014 where a score of children are poorly fed, poorly clothed, and quite untaught \u2014 where the poor idiot is half starved and beaten with rods because he is too dull to do his master&amp;#039;s bidding \u2014 where the aged mother is lying in perhaps her last sickness, unattended by a physician, and with no one to minister to her wants \u2014 where the lunatic, and that lunatic too, a woman, is made to feel the lash in the hands of a brutal underkeeper yet these are all to be found \u2014 they all exist in our State.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  This is where the glories of self-reliance and rugged individualism reveal their dark side. Widows and orphans could be expected to work for their bread, perhaps, but no fair-minded person could expect the mentally ill to raise themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yet for many of them, the poorhouses were a step up \u2014 all across America, &amp;quot;idiots&amp;quot; were kept in cages, chained to posts and beaten into obedience. And so it came to pass that in the years before the Civil War the great and brave Dorothea Dix began her solitary campaign to create federally funded state mental institutions, traveling 60,000 miles through the United States alone to visit the prisons, almshouses and asylums of the nation. After years of effort, both houses of Congress finally passed a bill to fund the state mental hospitals in 1854 \u2014 a bill that was immediately vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. His argument? Get ready for some d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu, my friends: It was unconstitutional to help the poor. &amp;quot;I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States.&amp;quot; Pierce was a &amp;quot;strict constructionist,&amp;quot; just like the Tea Party Republicans, Federalists, and libertarians we hear so much from today. He was also a feckless drunk who was trying to appease the states&amp;#039; rights fans in the South and later came out in support of the Confederacy, and he&amp;#039;s generally considered one of the least effective presidents in American history \u2014 the founder of the &amp;quot;can&amp;#039;t-do&amp;quot; spirit that has seized so much of our country today. This week, Congress has a chance to honor Pierce&amp;#039;s legacy \u2014 or to repudiate him and all his mingy and selfish and fearful heirs, and go back to building that shining city on the hill. Thoughts on the countdown to HCR? Tips? More obscure history textbooks? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com. Get Up-to-the-Minute Analysis from Esquire&amp;#039;s New Politics Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; MORE MUST-READS ON THE TEA PARTY &amp;amp;amp; HEALTH CARE:  E-mailing with the Wingnuts! Viva the Tea-Party Revolution on HCR? Crisis at the Crazy House EARLIER: Why the Tea Party Is Lying to Itself About Scott Brown   PLUS: More Frightening Signs from Fringe Protests   MORE RICHARDSON: New Political Analysis Every Tuesday   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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