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What is an Emergency?

Congress is about to pass an additional $32 billion emergency spending package to pay for the war In Afghanistan. It will have overwhelming bipartisan support, with legislators eager to display their fealty to the troops in an election year.

At the same time, the Congress is struggling with a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year, championed by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller. This faces a Republican filibuster and the opposition of many blue Dog Democrats, who argue that it shouldn’t be considered emergency spending.

What kind of country are we?

In the worst economic recession in 70 years, competitive industrial nations must choose their priorities — what gets saved, what must be sacrificed. No sensible leadership would choose to make children — particularly the children of working and poor families — pay the cost of the downturn.

This surely is how great nations decline.

Like Rome and Britain before us, Washington now chooses to police the world, even as it cuts back the education of the nation’s most vulnerable children. We fight two wars on the other side of the world, spend more defending South Korea from North Korea than the South Koreans do, increase military spending already nearly as great as the rest of the world combined while saying we can’t afford vital investments at home.

P.S. Please don’t give me lectures on our debt and the need to “pay for it.”

Conservatives in both parties don’t demand we pay for the increased so-called “emergency” spending for Afghanistan. And they oppose many ways to “pay for it” that would be immensely popular with their voters, but not their donors: tax the big banks, slow speculation with a financial speculation tax, end the “carried interest” scam that has billionaire private equity managers paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.