I love how Righties cling to their beliefs, even in the face of abject failure of their own policy & ideology.
Much like Lefties. Our situation is entirely the result of both parties, but neither side can see that.
It's all tied up in our concepts of ownership & obligation to each other. On the Right, the contention is and always has been that ownership entails no societal obligations at all, and we're seeing the results of that, plain & simple.
No, that's the libfantasy of the day. The idea of ownership is simple... people who own a house and stock and things like that tend to have more interest in a successful society and will generally act more responsible than those that have no real vested interest in society. The basic idea is that getting more people into the economic mix and tethering them to the future will have beneficial outcomes because people will have a higher interest in the stakes. It's just the owner vs renter principle write large. People who own tend to take care of their property more and are forced into responsibility on some level because of credit issues and such, and renters tend to have less interest in maintaining their property and don't have as much economic responsibility.
There is nothing terribly wrong with this and it's not the reason why our economic situation is jacked up. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to get more people involved and vested. Our current failures are mainly the result of the same two things that are affecting most "first world" nations... a rather pitiful managing of the reality of globalization and extreme budgetary failures resulting in enormous deficits and debt. The issues are complex, nuanced, and blame-spreading, so they don't lend themselves well to your watered down talking points and partisan memes. For political warriors fighting the team sport such as yourself, reality is ignored or misunderstood in favor of cheap shots and one-upmanship. Granted, most of the Right does this too and as long as all these retards keep fighting the partisan battle in front of their nose while disregarding what's important we'll keep getting what we're getting- worse. One of my favorite expressions is "The right answers to the wrong questions are the wrong answers to the right questions." We keep chasing our tails searching for the right answers to the wrong questions because we are geared and programed to fight the meaningless partisan war. If more people can removed themselves from the fakery and trivial nature of Right vs Left politics and start with a fresh look at policy then maybe we can start asking the right questions and actually fix some shit.
As trickledown Reaganomics has unfolded, cover for it has been provided by extending credit at every level. Instead of better wages & benefits, working people got a bigger line of credit & extended payment options. Instead of govt taking what it needed in taxes, it borrowed from the financial elite, who conveniently had the money to lend because they weren't paying it in taxes. Instead of offshoring & automation benefiting everybody, it mostly benefits those who actually own the business entities involved.
More failed Leftwing revisionism. The Left and the Right has turned Reagan into a mythic figure of either demonic or angelic proportions and neither are correct. Reagan was definitely not of the "deficits don't matter" school that exists now with many people, he was a typical member of the old guard who, like Bush the 1st, regarded high deficits are a major problem and tried to combat them. People like Dick Cheney may have said Reagan proved deficits don't matter but he was wrong, Reagan (and the first Bush) thought they mattered and they do matter. The peace dividend, semi-reasonable budgeting, and dot com bubble temporarily faked us out in the 90s, but our thinking problem only grew. Republicans learned the wrong lessons from Reagan and Democrats just continued being dumb.
It's been a rather masterful exercise in deception, but that's wearing thin, because we're reaching the end game of debt as a substitute for earnings, and we're reaching the end game of the way we look at work & employment.
False. There has been practically no deception at all from the Republicans. They have been very open and honest in their economic beliefs and plans and because of major miscalculations, bad luck, and political gamesmanship, those beliefs and plans generally sucked. The worst part is, the Democratic beliefs and plans were no better. Here's the thing: Everybody from Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan to most people everywhere, including those on the left, thought that after dropping gold in 1971, the government would be constrained by the market to act responsibly. The only problem, one that nobody really foresaw, was some countries -notably China- became very happy to buy unheard of amounts of Tbills to finance our irresponsible gluttony... which became wildly outrageous as the nation took leave of its senses during Bush 43 and basically stopped trying to pay for anything. Tax cuts skewed towards the rich and social programs skewed towards the poor and a couple wars going on... it didn't matter!
The discipline of the free currency markets after 1971 failed because of this totally unexpected windfall of easily being able to finance massive deficits by borrowing from other countries. Instead of a sharp devaluation in the dollar which would force the government to take the bitter pill of responsibility with some tax hikes and some spending cuts, we found a drug dealer in China would lend us money on a previously unheard of scale. China's strategy of export-led growth fit this perfectly since they could support our massive consumption habit and buy their shit while keeping their exports affordable by buying dollars to keep the dollar strong in relation to their yuan. Nobody knew that a global free market of currency wouldnt really exist because countries like Japan and China would manipulate their currencies to support the export growth model and their export model tunred out to support our consumption model perfectly. This is what allowed us to over-borrow and over-consume (and allowed countries like China to develop far more rapidly than they would have otherwise. Thanks to China, what everyone feared about deficits was no longer true
or so we thought. Republicans AND democrats were perfectly happy to gorge because it was relatively pain free.
The system doesn't need for Americans to work 40 hrs/wk to support the financial elite, but Americans need to have decent jobs to pay their bills & participate in the economy. Very few of us understood that it would come to this when the public responded favorably to the metaphor that a rising tide lifts all boats, some 30 years ago. We didn't realize what would happen, but we had our values, our beliefs, and faith in our leaders, particularly Reagan.
More typical Reagan hate. There was a generational shift after the first Bush among many on the Right In 1981, traditional Reps supported tax cuts matched by spending cuts to offset the way inflation was pushing taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. This was a fairly sound policy and it generally worked. Concerned with deficits, they rolled back almost half the tax cuts, especially once it came clear spending wasn't going to drop as much as they hoped, but inflation was crushed and the economy enjoyed a major resurgence in growth and productivity. Unemployment was low, profits were good. But a new cadre of Reps learned the wrong lesson and hooked the party on a delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if attacked with enough tax cuts. Tax cuts became an ideological pillar... tax cuts at all costs, no matter what. Never, ever, ever raise taxes (see the pledge and Grover N). All of this was done invoking an imaginary version of Reagan along with Democratic refusal to cut spending at all.
It's only a problem within the paradigm we accept about the role of business & govt in our lives. That paradigm is driven by innumerable right wing think tanks & institutes, talking heads & pundits. It's the headset that accepts the Job Creator meme, and accepts the idea that our vast military actually protects the country rather than the interests of American business overseas. It's the headset that firmly believes in work, a good thing, really, even in the absence of enough of it to go around. That's why we have offshoring & automation- to reduce the amount of work we need to do. We just need to realize that we need to find better ways to spread that benefit around, and our concepts of ownership w/o societal obligation can't & won't accomplish that.
Just more of the same, Right Wing bad blah blah., Left Wing good blah blah. No original thinking here whatsoever.
What's crept up on us is the fact that the ownership class no longer has as much labor overhead as they once did, and that labor overhead is really everybody else's livelihood. So we need to bring that overhead back up, one way or another, as an act of economic self defense. If we can't accomplish that through wages, and I don't think we can, then we need to find & accept other ways of doing so. Just so long as we treat our ownership class as well as the rest of the first world treats their own, we should be able to do that.
This just seems like a lukewarm attempt to make the usual government can save us and we need to be more like Europe argument and is pretty much regurgitated Krugman.
My overall point is that 1) Reagan is not a demon (or a tax-cutting God for the Right), 2) Dems and Reps fell for the budgeting failures equally, 3) most Reps have completely gone to shit since at least 2000, (most Dems have already been shit far longer), 4) the hyper-media-partisan-political game (which you are blissfully part of) and permanent campaign of Reps and Dems fuels the fires and only makes things worse, and finally a point I brought up but didnt really discuss 5) many of our problems are also due to massive mismanagement of globalization to which Reps and Dems are equally part of.
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