by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Until Reagan, the GOP, like grinches, snarled and toiled amid memories of Eisenhower's recession and, earlier, Herbert Hoover's 'Great Depression'. It was Democrats who were associated with labor, prosperity and, under LBJ, civil rights! It was the Democratic party that often stirred our better natures. The GOP never tried nor gave a shit! Eisenhower's crowning achievement was his prescient warning of the rise of a 'Military-Industrial Complex', a warning that fell on deaf ears. After that, it has been all down hill for an increasingly corrupt and morally moribund party, a party adrift, bereft of new ideas, in fact, contemptuous of the very words 'liberal', 'progressive' or creative.
Reagan cut taxes but not spending. Years following 1982 were deficit years. Thus: 'Supply-side' economics was and remains a fraud. By fiscal 2000, the share of GDP collected by the federal government as taxes amounted to 21%, up from an average of 18.7% in the last five pre-Reagan years 1976-1980. These facts alone reveal both the hypocrisy and the lie behind 'trickle-down' theory. As this unwelcome outcome was revealed, the CIA had likewise compiled a chart of world 'Current Account Balance
'. The US is at the very bottom of the list with the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance, a negative balance about four times that of the runner up debtor --Spain. If, as classical economists believed, that recessions are caused by 'contractions' of both monies in circulation and total productivity, then 'supply-side economics' is not merely bunkum and bullshit, it has left us on the brink and about to fall off the cliff.
How did this come to pass? As the ink was drying, Reagan-heads were pointing accusing fingers at one another. It was not always the fore finger! Budget Director David Stockman, famously, blamed a 'noisy faction of Republicans' for Reagan's tax cut and, more specifically, the 'trickle down' theory with which it was sold. Stockman called it a 'Trojan Horse'. No one in the Reagan administration or the GOP wanted to take the rap for the growing deficit. They would still have you believe that it was no one's fault. Or --more absurdly --it was because Clinton got a blow job!
Domestic Policy Advisor Martin Anderson resorted to GOP form, blaming Congress for the deficit. House and Senate leaders, however, pointed out that had Congress merely rubber stamped Reagan's plan, about 90 percent of the deficit would have remained. But rabid righters will not easily or willingly give up delusion. In the mid-1990s, so-called right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol, an early champion of 'supply side economics', tried to exculpate Reagan. The mistake, he said, was in the implementation! Supply-siders divided themselves four ways depending upon to whom they were devout li'l cultists --David Stockman, Robert Dole, Martin Anderson or Irving Kristol.
While only a truly bored person is fascinated by GOP in-fighting, there is to be had a satisfying sense of Schadenfraude when evil goppers turn on themselves. There is also satisfaction in the knowledge that the GOP is dead wrong and incompetent. There is frustration, however, that most folk just have not yet connected Reagan's policies with the impending collapse. Even now GOP consultants are spamming threads and 'forums' with buzzwords and focus-group approved slogans and claptrap. That these paid and rabid amateurs are soooooo adamant in dead Reagan's defense should set off alarm bells. What are the implications for this utterly failed party should the truth be known about Reagan?
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-gop-nurtures-lies-and-myths-about.html
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