March 16, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GREAT TAX DELUSION

It's strange that for a time the Republican party was called by some the "party of ideas." There's really nothing new in Republican land. You get variations on the same old nonsense. One of the core and enduring policies in Republican policies is tax cuts. Tax cuts are their economic plan, especially tax cuts for their fat cat friends. Never mind if you get whopping deficits or massive inequality. Tax cuts, we're told, will lead us to the land of milk and honey. Even in the recent "stimulus package" there were tax cuts. Analysts say the best stimulus would be to increase unemployment benefits and food stamp benefits, but Republicans hate anything that helps the working class or the poor. This article by Walter Williams and Bryan D. Jones is at seattlepi.nwsource.com:


Rather than see the stimulus package as a political and economic success, we see it as a mark of the continued failure of the political system to face problems and design policies directed at ameliorating them.

First, the experience with the economic stimulus package shows clearly that the federal government now lacks the capacity to cope with the massive economic problems that are pushing the nation toward second-class economic status.

Second, the source of this inability is the unshakeable ideological belief of President Bush and the Republican Party that income tax cuts are the cure-all for the nation's economic problems. This core belief led to a flawed stimulus package, a repeat of the bad logic leading to the administration's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Third, the 2008 legislation has many of the same flaws as the earlier tax cuts that put the U.S. on the path toward fiscal insolvency, left the middle class in the worst financial straits in the post-World War II era, and brought the widest income inequality since the 1920s-effects we document clearly in our new book, "The Politics of Bad Ideas: The Great Tax Cut Delusion and the Decline of Good Government in America."

January 19, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORKING CLASS


You can categorize the population of the United States in lots of ways. You can divide us by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by sexual orientation, by martial status, by religious affiliation and so on. But one thing the most of us share is that we are working class. Economics matter. I hope that Democratic candidates will not focus so much on "identity politics" that they lose sight of the working class. This article by E. J. Dionne is at www.washingtonpost.com:

Still, there will be inexorable pressure on both candidates to use identity politics for their own purposes. Gender solidarity was important to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in New Hampshire, and it could help her again. African American support will be valuable to Obama, especially in the Democrats' South Carolina primary on Jan. 26.


But the long term is another matter. To build a majority this fall and make history, both candidates would need a lot of help from a group with its own reasons to be discontented: the white working class.


"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.


BAD ECONOMICS 101

The Bush administration and Republican administrations in general demonstrate how not to run an economy. We've seen trickle down economics in various forms in all Republican administrations. In the Reagan and two Bush administrations we've seen trickle down economics on steroids. The country has been transformed from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. We've seen our manufacturing sector mostly disassembled and sent abroad. We've seen a growing middle class under attack and starting to disappear. We've seen stability in our financial sector undermined. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


The idea under which Bushenomics was sold is this:
The rich are the investor class.
If the rich have more money, they will invest more.
Their investments will create more business.
Those businesses will create more wealth, thus improving everyone's lives and making the nation stronger. They will also create new and better jobs.
Whether or not the people who say such things truly believe them, I cannot say. But that's their pitch, and the media certainly seems to buy it, as do most of the establishment economists.

A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.
They inherited a vastly wealth country.

They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.

Wherever possible, they literally sold off the assets. This was called privatization. Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. So when someone says, "Support the troops!" with budget appropriations, they should really yell, "Two-thirds support to the troops! One third support to Halliburton, et al.!"