So I finally found myself in front of the TV for one of the GOP debates. It was difficult to watch. Each candidate attempting to outdo the next in offering up the same worn-out, trickle-down reaganomic ideas of tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and militarization as the only solution for overcoming economic stagnation. They particularly want to deregulate Big Oil, Big Banks, and let polluters have a hay-day, all in the name of providing businesses "certainty" and "getting the government out of businesses". They especially want lower taxes on the rich. And they want to take the entitlement out of the earned benefit programs that ordinary Americans depend upon, calling it "shared sacrifice" from the poor and middle class. In other words, they are touting austerity economics for everybody except the elite plutocrats.
As Thomas Edsall says in his Nov. 6, 2011 New York times op-ed on The Politics of Austerity, the GOP "has reverted to the penny-pinching of an earlier era, the green eyeshade Grand Old Party of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, advocating a 'root canal' approach to governance." Edsall notes that the GOP is "racializ[ing] policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor" and at the same time conducting an "assault on public employees."
The problem, of course, is that these prescriptions for the economy are the wrong medicine. They are even more detrimental versions of the policies pursued by Bush that left us with a decade of stagnation and decline for the middle class and unwarranted lopsidedness in the way the rewards of the marketplace are distributed, with everything going to the very top. The deregulation that the GOP wants ensures that companies need not think about the harm they do to communities in the short term or long term. The tax cuts that the GOP favors ensure that the rich stay rich and that the country can't afford the programs that ushered in the golden age of the post war years, like almost universal education under the GI Bill, a newly confident elderly population under social Security and Medicare, a decently protected poor population with Medicaid and Unemployment Compensation, an improving environment through the Clean Air, Clean Water and other environmental laws and regulations.
If those who debated in Michigan on Wednesday night had their way on deregulation, American cities would revert to the smog-filled skies that now cover China and American waterways would again risk the flames of that river in Ohio. And none of that would create jobs, certainly not compared to the jobs that could be created by infrastructure development and green energy programs.
And if those debaters have their way on tax cuts and cuts in earned benefit programs--like Herman Cain's ridiculous 9-9-9 tax plan that would let the rich get off scot free while shifting the burden to the poor--the austerity program would grind our economy to a halt. As Edsall noted:
In many respsects, austerity feeds on itself. If the country needs to invewst in education and rebuilding infrastructure to regain competitiveness, as many economists of varying ideological stripes argue, those initatives are in large part precluded in a political environment that places top priority on deficit and debt reduction. Retrenchment, in effect, becomes a noose, choking off prospects for growth.
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