Re: The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President


"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3j83r2plcvbmp2pnclpjb4s1a7knk4vi8v@xxxxxxxxxx

Carter was a prophet of malaise, and Reagan was a prophet of optimism.

As was the captain of the Titanic - until it sank like the US economy and
the S&L industry both of which Reagan crippled.

Did the US economy sink? Silly me, I missed that entirely. I'm so dumb
I just kept designing stuff and selling it. Still do.

Reaganomics:

"Looking at the arc of U.S. history, we discover we've been on a downward
spiral ever since Ronald Reagan declared war on working people in 1981.
Companies cut prices and then cut wages so they can still turn a hefty
profit. Folks whose wages have been cut can't afford to shop at midrange
stores like Macy's, so they have to buy at "low-wage" discount stores like
Wal-Mart. That drives more midrange stores out of business and increases
pressure on discount stores to send their prices even lower. To compensate
for lower prices, they lower wages so they can still turn a hefty profit. On
and on it goes -- until the people working those jobs are no longer middle
class and have to work two or three jobs to survive."

"Beyond movie scripts, Reagan was authentic in his convictions--he brought
the flint-hearted libertarian doctrines of Hayek and Friedman to Washington
and put a smiling face on the market orthodoxy of "every man for himself."
Democrats had lost their energy and inventiveness, they were associated with
twenty years of contentious reforms, turmoil and conflict (and sought
relief, not by rebuilding their popular base with new ideas but by cozying
up to the business lobbies). In the end, the only folks who got truly
liberated by Reaganomics were the same people who had financed his rise in
politics, the Daddy Warbucks moguls from California and corporate behemoths
like General Electric.
Reagan's theory was really "trickle down" economics borrowed from the
Republican 1920s (Harding-Coolidge-Hoover) and renamed "supply side." Cut
tax rates for the wealthy; everyone else will benefit. As Reagan's budget
director David Stockman confided to me at the time, the supply-side rhetoric
"was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." Many middle-class
and poor citizens figured it out, even if reporters did not.

Reagan's great accomplishment was ideological--propelling the ascendancy of
the right--but the actual governing results always looked more like hoary
old interest-group politics. Wealthy individuals, corporate and financial
interests got extraordinary benefits (tax reductions and deregulation) while
the bottom half got whacked whenever an opportunity arose. His original
proposition--cut taxes regressively, double military spending, shrink
government and balance the federal budget--looked cockeyed from the start.
Yet when the logic self-destructed in practice, conservatives were
remarkably content, since they had delivered the boodle to the right
clients. After my notorious account of Reagan's economic failure, based on
my conversations with Stockman, was published in the December 1981 Atlantic
Monthly, the Gipper likened me to John Hinckley, the would-be assassin who
shot him. So much for Mr. Nice Guy.

Both parties would spend the next twenty years cleaning up after the
Gipper's big mistake. They collaborated in an ongoing politics of bait and
switch--raising taxes massively on working people through the Social
Security payroll tax while continuing to cut taxes for the more affluent and
to whittle down government aid for anyone else. The Gipper had taught
Washington an important new technique for governing--how to fog regressive
tax cuts past the general public without arousing voter retribution (the
media can be counted on to assist). The trickery continues to succeed.
Pre-Reagan politics used to address various economic inequities. The great
injustice confronted by George W. Bush was the estate tax on millionaires."




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