>> The Republicans want to lose in November.
Maybe the reason they want to lose is so that they can get Dems to
ballance the budget by shifting the tax burden, this way so they can
start again with a big bankroll like they did after the Clinton
surplus. Bush had fun spending that. They need some trickle up
economics once in a while and so they, as Chait says, can hibernate
till the bank is full again;
The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and
Hijacked by Crackpot Economics
by Jonathan Chait
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Con-Washington-Hoodwinked-Economics/dp/0618685405
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in
American politics—I mean, what's really happening—I wind up sounding a
bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My
politics are actually quite moderate. (Most real lefties, in fact,
think I'm a Washington establishment sellout.) So please give let me a
chance to explain myself when I tell you the following: American
politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic
extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a
few of them possibly insane. (Stay with me.) The scope of their
triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades,
they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights
of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a
generation ago—that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best
response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is
perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested
elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal
government—are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.
The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has
approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies,
not healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so
encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great
public challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or
intellectuals find the result congenial. Government is no smaller—it
is simply more debt- ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites.
And yet the right-wing ascendancy has continued inexorably despite
continual public repudiation. The 2006 elections were only the latest
electoral setback. The right has suffered deeper setbacks before, and
all of them have proven temporary. In 1982, after the country had
entered the deepest recession since the 1930s, Republicans were
slaughtered in the midterm congressional races, losing twenty-seven
seats in the House of Representatives. Ronald Reagan, whose election
two years earlier had seemed to augur a new conservative era, trailed
his likely 1984 Democratic challengers by double digits in the polls
and seemed destined to be a lame duck. "What we are witnessing this
January," wrote the esteemed Washington Post reporter David Broder in
the first month of 1983, "is not the midpoint in the Reagan
presidency, but its phase-out. 'Reaganism,' it is becoming
increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon."1 We know what happened
the next year.
And the conservative revolution has had its obituary written many
times since. In 1986, Republicans lost the Senate, and shortly
thereafter Reagan saw his approval ratings sink as he became embroiled
in the Iran- Contra scandal. In 1992, Democrats won back the White
House along with both chambers of Congress, and there was widespread
talk of "a conservative crackup." It happened again after the public
turned on the Republicans following their 1995 government shutdown,
and once more after the public rebelled against the Clinton
impeachment. By the late 1990s, the Republican revolution had again
been written off.
And yet the Republican right keeps coming back, and back, and back.
Their fortunes rise and then dip, but each peak is higher than the
last peak, and each dip is higher than the last dip. Consider the
present situation. Things have gone about as badly as they could have
in George W. Bush's second term. A Republican administration started
and lost a major war in Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed
to deliver higher wages for most Americans; contributed in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the near- wipeout of a major
American city; launched a failed assault on Social Security, the most
popular social program in the history of the United States; and saw
its members suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual and
financial scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the
slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold
their majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the
structural forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll
back any significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on
crises like global warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking
health insurance. Global warming, come to think of it, may offer the
best metaphor for understanding the conservative ascent. If you look
at the temperature of the earth from month to month, it bounces up and
down as seasons change and heat spells or cold snaps come and go. If
you look at it over the course of many years, however, it is clear
that it is moving inexorably in one direction. The arrival of winter
does not mean the end of global warming. To confuse the short term
blips with the long-term trend is to mistake the weather for the
climate. The 2006 elections are one of those blips, a pause in the
right's three-decade ascent.
Permanent partisan majorities are not possible in American politics.
Power changes hands regularly. Sometimes the other party's president
will preside over an economic boom or win a war. Sometimes yours will
preside over a recession or sleep with an intern. Short-term
fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party
in power, are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every
election but to control the terms of the debate. The conservative
movement's signal triumph is to have done just this, reshaping what is
possible in American politics over the long term. This is not,
therefore, a book about the political weather. It is a book about the
political climate.
Most people under forty fail to grasp how different American politics
looked three decades ago. For me, there is no better evidence of the
rightward lurch than recalling that my father used to be a Republican.
A liberal Republican, to be sure, but a Republican. By the time I was
old enough to understand anything about politics, he had long since
abandoned the GOP, and at first his former affiliation puzzled me. In
the political world in which I came of age —Ronald Reagan left the
White House during my junior year of high school—it seemed
inconceivable that someone like my dad, who today resides well within
the center of the Democratic Party, could identify in any way with the
Republicans.
But, of course, as someone my age could not have guessed, the parties
of a generation ago bore only a faint resemblance to their modern
versions. After World War II, the Republicans accepted the new role of
government in American life ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt. The
decades after the war saw a great American consensus. Democrats were a
bit looser with the purse strings, Republicans a bit tighter, but
their general vision of the country was the same. This vision was
expressed by the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower just before
his inauguration when he declared, "There is, in our affairs at home,
a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the
demands for the welfare of the whole nation. This way must avoid
government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the
helpless." This credo was the credo of the Republican Party my dad
could identify with. He looked up to GOP moderates like Nelson
Rockefeller and William Milliken, the long-time governor of our home
state of Michigan—men born to privilege who used their power for the
benefit of all, not just their own class.
Eisenhower left the top tax rate at a staggering 91 percent, and he
repeatedly preached the virtues of budget balance. (When a colleague
complained about this confiscatory rate, his treasury secretary, a
wealthy former steel executive, replied acidly, "I pay 91 percent, and
yet I don't complain and you do all the time."2 His line reflects a
sense of social obligation totally alien to today's GOP.) This
tradition of moderate Republicanism remained strong well into the
1970s. A Republican president, Gerald Ford, actually vetoed tax cuts
proposed by Democrats as fiscally irresponsible.
There were, of course, Republicans of a more conservative bent in
those days as well, but conservatism meant something altogether
different from what it does today. Indeed, the whole face of American
politics has changed. Opposition to deficits, which once made up the
right wing of the partisan debate, is now closer to the left wing. ("I
hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans," Bill Clinton
once noted wryly in a Cabinet meeting. "We stand for lower deficits
and free trade and the bond market.") Today's rightwing position—upper-
bracket tax cuts wherever and whenever possible—was off the right edge
of the political spectrum three decades ago.
The ground has shifted very far under our feet, and its manifestations
are everywhere. In 1979, the highest-earning one-tenth of 1 percent of
all taxpayers—the richest of the rich—took home only 3 percent of the
national income. Today they take home 10 percent. And over that same
span, their average tax rate has dropped from 32 to 23 percent. The
minimum wage has lost nearly half its purchasing power. The health
care plan proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, if introduced in Congress
today, would be considered radically liberal and probably could not
gain the support of any but a handful of the most left-wing
Democrats.
American politics has been transformed, yet in this change lies the
deeper mystery. The publi...
