Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Rejecting Reaganomics

Posted on April 7, 2011

(Return to the Contents Topics .. http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/blog-contents/ .. page.)

“The ‘science’ of economics today is not merely an institutionalized form of neo-feudal philosophy, nor is it merely an ideology of darkness that erects institutions to promote more darkness. It has become a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world. It is a path not merely to serfdom, but to death. We do have an alternative, though. We can believe what we see with our own eyes.” – Barry C. Lynn [1]

This quotation from Barry Lynn, a business and financial expert who spent more than a decade studying changes in the organization and culture of American capitalism before releasing his new book last year, may seem melodramatic. I assure you, it is not. In fact, it correctly describes how our misconceptions and stereotyped images of the economy have been misleading most of us into a dangerous and false sense of security.

For Lynn, “the dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world” relates mainly to the underlying false assumption of “freedom” associated with a monopoly dominated capitalist economy. That assumption is essential to our trust of Wall Street capitalists and willingness to cede economic control to them.

Lynn has impressively demonstrated how the American economy has morphed over the past 30 years into a tight bundle of financially oriented marketing monopolies that create dangerous production and supply systems to socialize their competitive and financial risks and shift those risks onto consumers. He shows, in fact, how entire segments of the economy can become “too big to fail,” once again placing the ultimate risk on all of us in the economic bottom 99%. This has transpired because of the discontinuance of anti-trust enforcement and reduced economic regulation that started with the “Reagan Revolution” in 1980.

We like to think we are living in an economy where outcomes are determined by a “free market.” It’s easy to be misled into accepting such an idealistic “pattern of the world” when we are not aware of the intimate workings of the economy, and when the image we hold seems to be based on sound academic principles.

For example, the classical economics of Milton Friedman, the main architect of today’s conservative economics movement, is soundly based. His explanation of classical economic theory, which results logically from its underlying assumptions, was of course correct. His ideological argument for personal freedom is sensible. And Friedman’s more controversial opposition to government welfare programs, in my opinion, is often based on sensible arguments. For example, Friedman favored a “negative income tax” as opposed to inefficiently administered government welfare programs. [2] That makes sense: Similarly, Robert Reich has sensibly proposed a negative tax as part of his proposed plan for recovery from the current crisis.

Friedman’s arguments about freedom and the proper role of government, however, presume the existence of a free and competitive economy, not a marketplace that as described by Lynn is in the destructive grip of tightly controlled, highly financialized monopolies. Friedman, like Reagan and Goldwater, .. http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/not-what-reagan-wanted/ .. and before them John Maynard Keynes, rejected the goal of establishing “equality of outcome” [3] and championed individual freedom of opportunity, free of authoritarian control. But like other classical conservatives, his views were presented in the context of opposition to communism. In his major writings he neither considered nor addressed how this freedom could also be snuffed out by plutocracy or fascism.

Nor of course did Friedman ever endorse as a component of classical economic theory the fraudulent core Reaganomics argument that has brought the U.S. economy perilously close to disaster, the false notion that cutting rich people’s taxes will result in economic growth and prosperity for everyone. [4] Lowering their taxes, the argument goes, will give rich people an incentive to increase investment in the economy, allowing prosperity to “trickle down” to everyone else. The argument is inconsistent with economic theory, and it could be distilled only from the Friedman’s ideological faith in capitalism, not from his economics.

When Reaganomics was first floated about 40 years ago, people my age with training in Keynesian .. http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/keynesian-economics-and-marriner-eccles/ .. economics recognized that this “supply side” argument was simply wrong. Economic growth results in response to increases in demand, or expected increases in demand, for goods and services. Such increases in demand offer firms the prospect of profitable investment. Because people with lower incomes spend earnings increases to a much higher degree than wealthy people, it is tax reductions for them that increase overall demand and stimulate the economy. Reaganomics wrongly assumes that rich people, instead of wanting more money, have an incentive to give their wealth away. But that makes no sense: If it were true, then presumably to not tax the rich at all would maximize prosperity. In fact, for poorer people to subsidize the rich would be even more beneficial.

We’re actually doing that: Despite enormous profits, big oil companies like Mobil/Exxon have enough influence to get billions of taxpayer dollars handed to them while paying minimal taxes on their profits. They have the political clout to make that happen. [5] But such taxpayer sacrifices have not maximized American prosperity over the last 30 years. Instead, Reaganomics has brought the economy to a recession and the brink of a depression. Meanwhile, the oil subsidies and corporate welfare have prevented us from marshaling those resources in more productive ways, like finding alternatives to oil, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, countering pollution, and ultimately saving the planet from global warming.

Reaganomics has been destroying the economy.

What has been ignored, for far too long, is that because wealth doesn’t trickle down, it accumulates at the top. Over the last 30 years, the lower taxes the Reagan Administration awarded the wealthiest Americans has transferred to them a huge share of the wealth of everyone else. We show that the top 1% has gained at least $10 trillion .. http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/growth-in-inequality-of-wealth-after-2007/ .. from the bottom 99% over this period. The effects of transferring that unimaginable amount of wealth to the hyper rich has been nothing less than staggering.

The rationale for Reaganomics is so illogical it’s troublesome that the ruse still works at all. But the wealthy few can’t sell their true, self-serving agenda, so the ruse is all they’ve got. All across America, recession-racked states with radical right-wing governments are enacting legislation that provides tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy while slashing education budgets and local services, the very life blood of everyone in the bottom 99%. In states like Ohio, such legislation is labeled a “jobs bill.”

After 30 years of applied Reaganomics, is this ignorance or just sick cynicism? Last night Rachel Maddow commented that she thought people are probably starting to catch on to the Reaganomics hoax. The financial overlords have amply revealed their intent to gather up for themselves what’s left of middle class wealth and prosperity.

Even so, that this is going on seems so stunningly bizarre, compared to what America used to be like, that just stating the truth seems to challenge one’s sense of sanity. And that’s part of the problem we all have when we try to talk about what’s going on today. We simply want to believe that even the very wealthiest people care about the future of America and its people, that we’re all in this together, and that the capitalism that drives them and their corporations is not that cold and heartless. But we can, and we must, “believe what we see with our own eyes.” The stunning lack of interest in the future of America and its people displayed by the radical right should be proof enough of why nothing has ever “trickled down.”

The disproof of Reaganomics has been piling up all along. We can all be excused for overlooking the true gravity of our situation much before now, however: It takes a while for information to accumulate and get published, we’ve been busy living our lives, and people who haven’t studied economics can be confused and intimidated by it, and avoid thinking about it.

Mostly, however, we’ve been kept in the dark all along, the truth obscured beneath a hazy layer of ideology, diversion, and self-congratulatory propaganda about American exceptionalism and the virtues of “free” market capitalism.

The good news is that economics is a science, the study of actual, real phenomena, not just “a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world.” Its honest and proper application provides the way out of this mess, if we hold on to science and reason. Of course we must also hold on to democracy long enough to get control of our government back, which we can do. But we can’t wait any longer.

JMH – 3/30/11, rev. 5/2/11

http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/rejecting-reaganomics/

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Excerpt from your 2nd one .. Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

ohn P. Judis sums up [ http://www.tnr.com/article/john-judis/92958/obama-lincoln-debt-ceiling ] the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. [my emphasis] It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. .. more ..
http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779