Once again, the American people are living in a time of utter concern for their economy. While the American government counts multi-digit points in military victories over hairy agents of terror and other enemies of the state, the ordinary American taxpayers might not be aware as to what extent their government’s military spending is costing their shallow pockets.

Through the decades, the American people have continued to learn the lessons that have to be learned: that of being democratically empowered to be stronger than their government. Unfortunately, they have short memory.

Eisenhower’s politics of the 1950s dubbed “Dynamic Conservatism” also known as “modern Republicanism” was translated into three concrete steps: budget cuts, big business’ government support, and state and local governments regaining federal functions. Ike, however, encountered a huge obstacle in reducing federal spending. Military and foreign aid was rising in demand, thus political costs were becoming more demanding. When Eisenhower ended his term, the “US had the highest peacetime deficit to that time, growing from $266 billion in 1953 to $286 billion in 1959.” The American publics also started to be wary of their government.

The U.S. got paranoid with Communism. It thought that if Communism succeeds in eating into the whole of Vietnam, it will gobble up the whole of Southeast Asia. So, even if the American people knew that China and Russia were the real enemies, their government poked its nose, much to their chagrin and utter disappointment, in the Vietnam War – a war that the Vietnamese people did not want to be fought for them, and which the American people wanted nothing to do with. Would the American taxpayers have known that this anti-Communism war cost the U.S. more than $167 billion dollars a year? They probably knew more about Agent Orange eradicating more than 25 percent of Vietnam’s forests, or that the war cost 2.5 million lives and displaced millions more. The Vietnam War caused the American people to question the power of the government’s executive branch. This resulted in many legislative solutions by Congress to halt the use of excessive or secret force being employed without the President informing Congress.

(It was with the Watergate scandal that the American public truly began to mistrust the federal government. The Watergate scandal tremendously changed the American psyché. It drove deep skepticism in the minds of the American people towards their government, and the ‘imperialistic’ powers of the presidency and the White House. The Watergate scandal eventually and consequently weakened the power of the US presidency.)

Reaganomics aimed to make its proponent different from his immediate predecessors. Reagan presided over a country during a time of ‘stagflation,’ a period known for high inflation and unemployment. His newfangled economic reforms rested on four principles: reduction in the growth of government spending, reduction in marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital, reduction in government regulation of the economy, and control of the money supply to reduce inflation. In attempting to cut back on domestic spending while lowering taxes, the Reagan era was also marked by heavy cuts in social programs, and large-scale deficit spending on the military. Reagan’s tax reforms pushed the federal budget into deficit, leading to a significant increase in public debt.

George W. Bush’s War on Terror has been a massively-funded military expedition against terrorists, thereby giving birth to such a global sociopolitical phenomenon called Islamophobia. This US-backed colossal global war against terrorism has been hurting the pockets of each and every American taxpayer. The war in Iraq alone had been costing $4,681 per household, $1,721 per person, and $341.4 million per day.

Meanwhile back home, economic recession has been hurting the ordinary Americans. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner for Economics in 2008, said in his New York Times Op-Ed column, “The U.S. economy needs to add more than 100,000 jobs each month just to keep up with growth in the working-age population. Over the past 6 months, non-farm payroll employment has fallen more than 400,000. So, job creation this year has fallen well over a million jobs short.”

The American people have had many instances to learn the lessons they have to learn. Their short and shrift memory make them forget the lessons learned. They always forget that they have a democracy where no government should be more powerful than them.

Either that or they simply get the government that they deserve.

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Via The White House