Two Failed Parties: The Real Political Narrative of The Past Half-Century

[El Pinko]

Now I know what you're thinking. Before you start calling me a "Naderite", know that I am not one.

I'm a left-winger who reluctantly supports the right-leaning democratic party for lack of an alternative in this nutso country of ours, and I fully intend to vote for Obama. (The Schadenfreude of his winning alone would be worth voting for him)

That being said, this article has a great deal of truth to it (even though the author is a bit more of the libertarian persuasion than I care for). In fact, it has too much truth for comfort.

For those of you wrapped up in partisan fervor, do yourself a favor and read this, and if by some miracle Obama does win, please, let's put the fire to his and the Congress' feet and demand an end to the "same-old-same-old"!











http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept08/politics9-08.html


Two Failed Parties: The Real Political Narrative of The Past Half-Century (September 10, 2008)


...Unfortunately, government spending didn't drop during the Reagan years--it expanded rapidly. The chastened Democrats entered into a Devil's Pact with the GOP--keep expanding middle-class entitlements, and we'll approve your "guns and butter and borrow" budgets....What neither party can willingly grasp is the cost structure of the U.S. economy has exploded to unaffordability on every level. College: unaffordable. Medical care: unaffordable. Local government: unaffordable. The list is endless. The only affordable items are goods manufactured in Asia, and everyone already has one or two or three of those.

.....

Their top 1% PTB (Powers That Be) "best friends" are weeping and sobbing and gnashing their teeth, begging please save us! and of course they quickly responded with a massive, unaffordable bailout of Wall Street and the entire lending and housing industries. But since the structural problem is deficit spending, then borrowing trillions more is literally like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Here it is in a nutshell: Keynesian "deficit spending" was supposed to be reserved for deep recessions, but instead it has been the basis of our bogus "prosperity" for 24 of the past 28 years.

.....

The parties will then face a most uncomfortable dilemma: they will be unable to raise taxes or borrow more money, and thus they will either have to cut benefits drastically, renounce the debt, or hyper-inflate the dollar so they can pay back all debt with worthless currency. Not a happy set of choices, but there are no others. The idea that we can just borrow a half-trillion dollars each and every year forever with no consequences is sadly not based in reality. (And that's not counting the hundreds of billions borrowed at the state and local levels via muni bonds.)

So now we return to the beginning: the Powers That Be (the 1% which owns 2/3 of all assets and the media) and an American public accustomed to 50 years of rising entitlements will not accept re-regulating the economy and reductions in entitlements. Thus the next president will be a caretaker, flailing uselessly around with immaterial reforms and policy tweaks while the economy founders toward to ruin.





I don't agree with some of the particulars, but on the big picture, this guy has it right - both parties are tying us, the citizenry, to an unsustainable pattern of governance and economic (mis)management, and it's becoming increasingly clear that we all are going to go down with the ship, and they get us to go along with it by telling us what we want to hear, whether it be "national healthcare" or "fiscal conservatism", they have no intention of delivering either.
:banghead:

[tom_paine]

1. This is a smart analysis, but deeply flawed in a couple ways.

First, one of the author's key assumptions in the "background" part of the article is 100% false and diametriclly opposite of reality.

Income taxes, corporate and personal, in the 30-1963, were high. VERY high. Too high, IMHO.

But much of his thesis flows from the idea that those were "low tax years".

Quite the opposite.

Second, and perhaps the worst flaw, is the presumption of equal levels of corruption. The old "everybody is responsible equally because they all do it".

Do I need to tell you or anyone else, ElPinko, that is absolutely NOT the case, whatever flaws and corruptions the Democrats have (and they have plenty) or had (it's true that he Democratic Base has now become the Bushie Base, by and large...and yes, it was the most venal segment of the population by and large - there are always exceptions - THEN and NOW.

So, while the overall thesis of the article, the Big Picture, is largely true and relevant, the analysis is flawed and facile, IMHO

[El Pinko]

2. I don't think the overall tax burden has changed much at all since then.

The difference is that it has been shifted downward.

Back before Reagan, marginal tax rates were much higher on the highest brackets, but there were a lot more loopholes.

Since the taxes on the rich were slashed, the government made up for the lost revenue with increases in regressive taxes like the doubling of the payroll tax, and jacking up of user fees and excise taxes, pushing the tax burden onto the states so that they would raise regressive sales taxes.


I suppose the wealthy and upper-middle classes perceive their taxes as high mainly because every other damn thing is (as the article mentions) so damn expensive.

I'm only 39 and my dad was not rich, but before Reagan, he supported us on one income, and we even had a cleaning lady come in 3 times a week. He was a midlevel government bureaucrat.

NO WAY today...