The Big, Long, 30-Year Conservative Lie

[DonViejo]

Monica Potts

Inequality, conservatives insist, is natural. Trying to combat it will slow growth. Well, guess who now says otherwise? Standard and Poor’s.

First came Occupy Wall Street, and its pitch-perfect slogan on inequality: “We are the 99 percent.” After that movement fizzled, Thomas Piketty, the handsomely ruffled French professor, released a 685-page book explaining that we really were living in a new Gilded Age in which the wealth gap was as wide as it had ever been. Finally, in June, one of the plutocrats sitting atop the piles of money he made in the digital revolution, Nick Hanauer, wrote an article in Politico magazine—it’s the most-shared story ever on Politico’s Facebook page—warning that the pitchforks were coming, and rich people like him should advocate for a healthier middle class and a higher minimum wage.

The debate over inequality is now raging, and most Americans are unhappy about the widening divide between the haves and have-nots. Hanauer has been making the same case for years, drawing heaps of both praise and scorn. Forbes magazine has alternately called Hanauer insane and ignorant. His TED University presentation calling for a $15-minimum wage was left off the organization’s website because it was deemed too “political.” That’s nothing next to Piketty’s detractors, who at their most extreme accused him of twisting his data.

Hanauer and Piketty inspire these broadsides because they are challenging, in a far more aggressive way than plutocrats and economists usually do, the conservative economic orthodoxy that has reigned since at least the 1980s. Under Ronald Reagan, we called it trickle-down economics, the idea that the men who can afford their own private jets—they’re usually men—deserve gobs of money because they provide some special entrepreneurial or innovative talent that drives the American economy.

That’s well known. Far less often discussed is the flipside of this belief: that helping the less well off will dampen the American money-generating engine—that it will hurt growth, because the only thing that inspires the “job creators” to work so hard is the promise of insanely vast financial rewards. Poverty is a necessary evil in this worldview, and helping the less well off creates a “culture of dependency,” which discourages work. “The United States thrives because of a culture of opportunity that encourages work and disdains relying on handouts,” Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation wrote in 2012, neatly summing up the conservative ethos.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/08/the-big-long-30-year-conservative-lie.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. Occupy did not "fizzle out" -- it survived violent repression by the government via the police

Remember all those mass arrests? The tearing down of Occupy sites around the U.S.? The violence by police?

As far as I know, Occupy still exists, and has shifted some of its focus to helping people fight foreclosures.

[Chasstev365]

4. Where as if Tea Party...

shows up at a Hardees in rural Oklahoma with 8 angry racists claiming they want "government out of their medicare." (that was a real sign, no joke), the media covers it like its Tienanmen Square. Liberal Media. Sure right wingers: keep telling yourself that!

[valerief]

8. +1

[brewens]

2. What is critical to the 1% is that they make the upper middle class believe that anything

we do to make things more fair has to come out of their hide. It's low income people that want what they've got.

[Adam051188]

3. it will

Because they own the government because of the supreme court.

35 years of stupid has consequences, I fear.

[ffr]

7. And that decision always falls on the voters

You're statement is right. It's just that voters or should I say non-voters allow the few people who do vote to elect people who then appoint their cronies. GWB was the cronie king. And while my Republis buddies say they didn't like everything the GWB did, our country is suffering the consequences for not having enough voters to say otherwise.

We reap what we sow.

GOTV November 2014

NO
MORE
REPUBLIS!

[Dustlawyer]

12. SCOTUS made it worse, but corporations and the very wealthy have been able to buy off our

(Former) Representatives. Regular individuals, if they give at all, give $5, 10, 20 bucks, the 1% give the max and use "Bundlers" to get more say. Until we get smart enough and pissed enough to do something about it we will continue to get screwed.

[MillennialDem]

11. Not just that. They want the poor, working class, middle class, and upper middle class to all

hate each other.

This is especially true between the poor and working class. You're working hard while those welfare bums sit at home!!!

But it applies to all the groups between each other. Teachers and college professors have it so easy because they get summers off. Cops, firefighters and government workers get huge pensions and get to retire as millionaires at 50!

Mostly falsehoods and things that would barely earn a half truth.

But infighting is what the 1% wants. Anything to deflect away from their theft.

[brewens]

16. Yup. it's the looting at the top that is screwing everyone. Some guy making $70 thousand a year

has a nicer truck and boat than I do and thinks he's got it made. He thinks the Republicans are on his side and protect him from paying even higher taxes and having poor people take away what he's got. It's like the slave owners would do to a slave they put to work in the big house or whatever easier work. Holding it over their head that if they don't behave, they will be right back in the fields!

The reality is that if the shit hits the fan, $70 thousand dollar guy goes down because the 1% throw him under the bus. that guy probably gets hit hard tax wise. He pays full bore because he can't dodge what the big boys can dodge. Make no mistake, I'd be delighted to pay what he pays in taxes! People like that could get a tax break and get more for their tax dollars if the 1% would really pay their fare share.

[mindwalker_i]

5. Krugman's piece in the NYT echos this

In a way, it kind of makes sense. Economies are built bottom-up, meaning that first a market develops, then someone comes along a fills it. If the people at the base - the krill - don't have money, they can't become markets and it doesn't matter what people make.

[Adam051188]

6. the point is to transform "the marketplace"....

Into a new form of privately owned government. A new feudalism if you will. Its about power, nothing else.

[cantbeserious]

9. The Oligarchs, Corporations And Banks Own And Control The Politicians That Own And Control Us

eom

[libodem]

10. Yep

[img][/img]

[colsohlibgal]

13. The Big Con And The Suckers Who Are Enablers.

The suckers are middle class and below middle class people who buy into the con and by so doing keep making the rich richer.

They need to wise up and realize they are helping allow corporations like Exxon and BP make zillions while paying precious little taxes if any.

[Enthusiast]

14. Protecting the General Welfare should be the primary function of the government.

No question about it.

The government has been allowed to stray from this primary duty.

[rhett o rick]

15. It's not rocket science. Unregulated capitalism will collapse. As the big fish eat the smaller

fish, and the big, big fish eat the big fish, pretty soon you have but one fish left with no one to eat. Our big money society has found that it's easier to steal from the lower classes than it is to build wealth. Once the lower classes run out of money, the big money fish will turn on each other. Some have already figured this out as members of the 1% are crying because the 0.01% are getting wealthier at a faster rate.