Feckless and stupid, take your pick
Paul Krugman's editorial about the Bush tax cuts in today's Times is a must-read:
It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues — that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut — was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories.
Yet by pushing through another huge tax cut in the face of record deficits, the administration clearly demonstrates either that it is completely feckless, or that it actually wants a fiscal crisis. (Or maybe both.)
...
The pain of these benefit cuts will fall on the middle class and the poor, while the tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the rich. For example, the tax cut passed last week will raise the after-tax income of most people by less than 1 percent — not nearly enough to compensate them for the loss of benefits. But people with incomes over $1 million per year will, on average, see their after-tax income rise 4.4 percent.
The Financial Times suggests this is deliberate (and I agree): "For them," it says of those extreme Republicans, "undermining the multilateral international order is not enough; long-held views on income distribution also require radical revision."
Here's the thing, the radical Right suggests that the most successful people should not be penalized for their success. But they fail to understand that one of the reasons those opportunities for success exist is the general prosperity of the nation, which has a lot to do with those costly schools and social programs they hate. If the net result of the tax cuts is a decline in disposable income for all but the wealthiest 10 percent or one percent, then the macroeconomic rationale for the tax cuts (albeit spectral as they were) are not merely gutted but can only be ascertained as outright lies.
As a businessperson, one who isn't hurting as bad as some folks in today's contracted and contracting economy, I am profoundly worried that the radical free marketers are preparing to vote with their feet for a world without the rest of us. How will they vote with their feet? By walking all over the rest of us. Now, if none but the richest strata of society has choices about their future,what is left of the American Way? Nothing. And that's why even the Right should be deeply concerned at this point. Krugman wants to know why the public isn't alarmed. I want to know what happened to the conservatives who were conserving American values of opportunity and choice.
As a citizen and writer, I am outraged at the absence of a coherent political response to the sudden and disastrous course the country has embarked upon and I am working on that.
Here's Kevin Phillips on what used to be important to conservatives:
...a letter of November 21st, 1864 allegedly written by Abraham Lincoln. Looking beyond the war, he said “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.” Amid the excitement of the Nasdaq, hardly anyone paid attention.
Many scholars doubt the genuineness of this letter, and it is a very blunt statement of sentiments that our sixteenth president usually expressed with more restraint. My point, though, is that such viewpoints – which now get one read out of the Republican Party – have a surprising and distinguished history within it. When Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, his attacks on corporations far exceeded Lincoln’s, and at one point, TR specifically repeated and endorsed Lincoln’s oft-quoted remarks about labor being superior to and more deserving of support than capital.
Some of this GOP skepticism lingered on in the years of Eisenhower and Nixon. Back in 1990, when I published The Politics of Rich and Poor, some of its success was owed to the two lead endorsements on the back of the book jacket. One was from New York Governor Mario Cuomo, then widely expected to be the 1992 Democratic presidential nominee. The second was from former President Richard Nixon, who gave it with full knowledge that the book was critical of the Reagan and Bush administrations for favoring the rich. Nixon’s streetcar worker father had left Ohio for California after getting a name as labor agitator, and he thereafter interrupted his McKinley Republicanism to support third-party progressives like Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert LaFollette in 1924. Richard Nixon himself as president supported national health insurance, income-maintenance for the poor and higher taxation of unearned than earned income. The 1972 Republican platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.
Because my own background is Republican, and I now know much more of GOP history on these subjects, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Republican economic polices and biases of the 1990s and early 2000s are a narrow-gauge betrayal of the legacy of the two greatest Republican presidents, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
If anyone should be pissed off it's my middle-income Republican neighbors. The rest of us are just stunned, stupified and enraged; that's not good either.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at May 27, 2003 09:58 AM | TrackBack