Markle wrote: 2seaoat wrote:IF the point was about economics,
It was not about economics generally, but very specifically the failure of trickle down economics. You evidently forget who was responsible for that flawed and failed concept which has adversely impacted the nation for more than the 16 years.
Say what?
It is not about economics...but it is about...economics?
As you know well, and it pains you greatly, former Presidential Great, Ronald Reagan's economic policies dug us out of the quagmire caused by President Carter and led to a quarter century of growth.
https://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/17/the-abject-failure-of-reaganomics/
The Abject Failure of ReaganomicsOctober 17, 2013
Exclusive: House Republicans got next to nothing from their extortion strategy of taking the government and the economy hostage, but they are sure to continue obstructing programs that could create jobs and start rebuilding the middle class. What they won’t recognize is the abject failure of Reaganomics, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Even as the Republican Right licks its wounds after taking a public-opinion beating over its government shutdown and threatened credit default, the Tea Partiers keep promoting a false narrative on why the U.S. debt has ballooned and why the economy struggles, a storyline that will surely influence the next phase of this American political crisis.
If a large segment of the American public continues to buy into the Tea Party’s fake reality, then it is likely that both the political damage and the economic decline will continue apace, with fewer good-paying jobs, a shrinking middle class and more of the bitter alienation that has fed the Tea Party’s growth in the first place. In other words, the United States will remain in a vicious circle that is also a downward spiral.
President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981.
The pattern can only be reversed if American voters come to understand how and why their economic well-being is getting flushed down the drain.
The first point to understand is that the current $16.7 trillion federal debt is about $11 trillion more than it was when George W. Bush took office. Not only did Bush’s tax-cut-and-war-spending policies send the debt soaring over the next dozen years but it was those policies that eliminated the federal surpluses of Bill Clinton’s final years and reversed a downward trend in the debt that had “threatened” to eliminate the debt entirely over the ensuing decade.
Amazingly, President Clinton left office in January 2001 with the federal budget in the black by $236 billion and with a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion. The budgetary trend lines were such that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan began to fret about the challenges the Fed might face in influencing interest rates if the entire U.S. government debt were paid off, thus leaving no debt obligations to sell.
Thus, Greenspan, an Ayn Rand acolyte who was first appointed by Ronald Reagan, threw his considerable prestige behind George W. Bush’s plan for massive tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy. In that way, Bush and the Republicans “solved” the “problem” of completely paying off the federal debt.
When Bush left office in January 2009 amid a meltdown of an under-regulated Wall Street there was no more talk about a debt-free government. Indeed, the debt had soared to $10.6 trillion and was trending rapidly higher as the government scrambled to avert a financial catastrophe that could have brought on another Great Depression.
Reaganomics’ Failure
But this debt crisis did not originate with George W. Bush. It can be traced back primarily to President Reagan, who arrived in the White House in 1981 with fanciful notions about restoring America’s economic vitality through massive tax cuts for the wealthy, a strategy called “supply-side” by its admirers and “trickle-down” by its critics.
Reagan’s tax cuts brought a rapid ballooning of the federal debt, which was $934 billion in January 1981 when Reagan took office. When he departed in January 1989, the debt had jumped to $2.7 trillion, a three-fold increase. And the consequences of Reagan’s reckless tax-cutting continued to build under his successor, George H.W. Bush, who left office in January 1993 with a national debt of $4.2 trillion, more than a four-fold increase since the arrival of Republican-dominated governance in 1981...
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F. G. Sanford
October 17, 2013 at 10:49 pm
“Trickle-down” economics always conjures in my mind that acrid stench of naphthaline and ammonia produced by deodorant cakes in the urinals of bus terminals. It’s the smell of poverty, familiar to anyone who’s been there. I might be preaching to the choir, but I don’t think Americans understand how all this works. Some of you at Consortium News probably should write a “Dick and Jane” version, so everybody understands.
Why would Alan Greenspan be worried that the “National Debt” could get paid off? The answer to that question is the last thing they want Americans to understand. Apparently, thousands of Ph.D. economists don’t understand either, because I can only think of two or three who have mentioned it it the last twenty years.
Basically, interest on the “National Debt” insures a steady welfare check to the rich. Like mob bosses, “they gotta get their cut”. The Federal Reserve acts as a loan shark, and the interest payments go to millionaires. Politicians (bookies) work to drive up the debt (bets) so the payoffs get bigger, and millionaires happily pay “protection” money in the form of campaign contributions. Anywhere else, that’s called bribery. The politicians shake down the taxpayers so the government can pay off, but the “protection” money keeps the millionaires from getting tax hikes. This worked fine until they got so greedy the government couldn’t “make book”. The only way they could keep the scam going was to print money. In the real world, that’s called counterfeiting. As too much phony money started threatening the millionaires’ bottom line, they sent in Tea-Party “enforcers”. They want the government to rob the people’s piggy bank – Social Security – to maintain this protection racket. But if the national debt gets paid off, the mob bosses no longer get their “cut”.
So far, not one single measure has been passed in Congress that will improve this situation. The jobs moved off-shore will not come back. Tax revenue continues to diminish as low-wage jobs replace those lost. The rich continue to exploit tax loopholes and move their assets out of the country. More and more Americans will come to recognize that aroma: “Eau de Greyhound”. That’s not the worst thing the impoverishment of America has in store for us. There are things that smell a lot worse. The mob boss “job creators” have the solution. But it’s not trickle-down, it’s “lock-down” in one of those “for profit” prisons. They’re gonna make sure some patsy takes the rap, because they’re “too big to jail”.
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