April 29, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


REAGAN'S ATTACKS ON THE MIDDLE CLASS

Ronald Reagan has been an idol of the far right in this country. There is a great deal of mythology attached to Reagan. Right-wingers will claim that Reagan "won the Cold War." They will claim, falsely, that his budget-busting tax giveaways to the rich stimulated the economy to unprecedented levels and created all kinds of good jobs. In fact, Reagan's agenda was a bellicose foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, massive military spending, and massive redistribution of wealth to the richest Americans. Dean Baker takes a look at the real history in this article at www.alternet.org:

U.S. politics took a sharp turn to the right in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Domestically, Reagan touted an agenda that would lead to a sharp upward redistribution of income. Internationally, Reagan explicitly rejected the "détente" framework for engaging the Soviet Union that had been accepted by the leadership of both major parties since the beginning of the Cold War. In its place, Reagan put forward a doctrine of U.S. unilateralism in which the United States basically claimed the right to do whatever it wanted, unconstrained by allies or international institutions.

The welfare state in the United States was always weaker than in West Europe, but in 1980 it was reasonable to believe that West Europe presented a model that the United States would follow. Medicare and Medicaid were still relatively new programs, having been established just 14 years earlier. Having recently seen a massive expansion of publicly provided healthcare coverage, many people believed that it would not be long before healthcare coverage was extended to the entire population. Other features of European welfare states, such as long vacations, short work weeks, and paid parental leave (generally maternity leave at the time), also seemed feasible political goals.

GILDED AGE THE SEQUEL

A few years ago there was a guy I call Bad Talk Show Host, who hosted a show on KFRE Radio before it changed format. Bad Talk Show Host had a problem with programs like unemployment insurance ("a paid vacation") and other social programs. I once sent him a fiery fax that he apparently wanted to go back to those good old days before the New Deal. He made some snarky on the air comment about "not being around" back in those days. To hear right-wingers tell it, though, those were great times. It was the time when unregulated capitalism reigned. The latter part of the 19th century was called the Gilded Age and exemplified a huge gap between the rich and everyone else in the country. Looking at it now, people like John D. Rockefeller were minor leaguers compared to the people at the top of the ladder now. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth.

Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.