During the next election cycle Compromise will be the dreaded word in Washington. If the sling aimed at any vulnerable representative or senator is loaded with that word, the only safe defense that will be retreat into the party line. Both parties need a refreshed world view. Both parties have lines that were developed at earlier times in history that were different from this time. I watched a couple of days ago as Republican congressman Brian Bilbray squirmed his way around his own earlier declarations about what is needed for immigration reform. What he had said in an interview a few days earlier suggested that he believes California must protect itself from infiltration by Mexicans and other Latinos. Apparently someone told him that he had painted Latino citizens with too broad a brush, and he was trying unsuccessfully to make what he had said less offensive. But he needn’t have worried because his Rancho Santa Fe-North Coast San Diego County district doesn’t have enough Latino American citizens to unseat him the way he was unseated when he was a first-term congressman from the district where he lived in Imperial Beach; but he runs scared knowing he is weak enough in just about every aspect except his Republican Party affiliation to be turned out if he doesn’t toe the party line. He will always vote the way the leader of his party in the House tells him to vote.

Understanding one’s personal history is important. I have lately been reviewing mine in order to try to understand why I believe what I believe, and why I vote the way I vote. When I think back to my childhood and remember the time when my parents moved our family after World War Two from rural Arkansas to rural Northern California, I recognize that we were immigrants. Most native Californians didn’t want us for anything but farm labor. We spoke English, but it was a Southern dialect that was assumed to be the language of ignorant peasants the way Spanish-accented English is assumed even by some of my now gentrified relatives and friends to be the language of know-nothing, no-nothing people. I am an old man now. It has been a long time since my parents with their six children in an old Chevy coupe made the trip from Glenwood, Arkansas, to Live Oak, California. In 2010 we are no longer the strangers in a land no longer strange. We have assimilated. Our children and grandchildren grew up with no hint of their parent’s and grandparent’s Arkansas dialect. But when I hear Brian Bilbray declare that his California, our California, his America, our America, is threatened by undeserving interlopers from some other place, I am offended because I know he would once-upon-a-time have been talking about me. When he says an eighteen-year-old girl whose parents brought her to California from Mexico when she was two-years-old should be treated like any other illegal immigrant, this girl who doesn’t even speak the Mexican Spanish her parents spoke when they brought her here, this girl whose education and acculturation have been Californian and American from the time she was a toddler, this girl who is bright and law-abiding and dreams of being a doctor... I know exactly what Representative Bilbray's problem is: His world view isn’t adequate for the job he has been elected to do in Washington... My point is that as an immigrant Californian I am offended by Brian Bilbray’s insensitivity and ignorance. He is unwilling to cooperate with President Barack Obama’s plan to help this young woman become an American citizen. He is unwilling to allow her to pay in-state tuition to California colleges. He says she must go back to the end of the line with the millions of others out there in the world who would like to emigrate from poverty and deprivation to Mr. Bilbray's land of milk and honey. He wants her sent back to a Mexico that she doesn’t even remember.

Brian Bilbray, Mitch McConnell, and John Boehner share a flawed, inadequate world view. The world they talk about in their political speeches doesn’t exist. They understand that Americans want them to do something about the economy. Americans want it fixed, but these leaders take their cues from people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh who continue to insist that the bad economy is big government’s fault and that the main job of every Republican is to make government smaller. They seem not to know that before the Reagan years first in California and then in Washington, the state and the nation had a solid, growing middle class. They seem not to know that it was a Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who put in place a tax structure that ensured the development of a strong middle class. Since the Reagan years, a steadily increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone not to a developing middle class but to the top one percent of citizens. The Republican leaders in Washington seem not to hear when economists demonstrate that the top one percent take in almost a quarter of the total income in this country. Thirty years ago, the top one percent got only nine percent of total income. During the period of time between the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower years and The Reagan years, the purchasing power of the middle class kept the economy going. Rich people spend a much lower portion of their incomes, so it stands to reason that the economic engine is sluggish and slow when the middle class shrinks and there is far less money being spent. (During the Eisenhower years the highest marginal rate of income tax was 91 percent, and the economy flourished.) The economy has kept its steam for as long as it has since the Reagan years only because middle class families use credit to spend more than they take in. Middle class families now must have two incomes just to survive. People work longer hours to take in more money. One of the causes of the recession we are in now was that middle class families used their homes as collateral to borrow even more money so they could keep spending; and when the deflation of home values left them with more debt than they could possibly manage, many of them lost their homes, and the economic engine broke down.

We need people in Washington who have the courage to stop singing the same old song about shrinking government and who have the intelligence and skill to reorganize the economy so it will grow a strong middle class again. They have got to get away from the trickle-down fantasy from the Reagan years and recognize that the small number of rich people in the country will not ever make the economy grow the way a larger middle class will do it. We must do whatever it takes to restore the middle class. Exempt low wage earners from paying income tax so they can put everything they earn back into the economy. Apply payroll taxes to the incomes of people whose living conditions will not change by a bigger tax bite. I am old enough to be included in the Medicate program. I know how good it is. Extend that program to all Americans. To build a middle class of well-educated Americans, make higher education free to families earning low incomes. Put people to work. Hire a great army of teachers. Reestablish the old WPA and repair and rebuild our infrastructure. Get the unemployed back to work as soon as possible.

It takes good government to do what needs to be done. Shrinking government is not the answer. Good government, adequate government, responsible government is. By continuing to cry about big government, McConnel and Boehner show that they don’t understand what the problems are. Why should we continue to expect reasonable solutions from them?