'Take Back Our Party' Chapter 2: Bad Policy

[TexasTowelie]

Last edited Sun Dec 15, 2019, 09:38 PM - Edit history (1)

by James Kwak

Things have not changed so much since the days when Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. There are exceptionally wealthy families, and then there is everyone else. As a society, we clearly have the capacity to produce enough goods and services to enable everyone to live in material comfort, with decent food and clothing, a safe place to live, a comprehensive education from preschool through college, and even a reasonable amount of health care. The total income of all Americans is more than $54,000 per person—that’s more than $210,000 for a family of four. Yet many people can barely get by. Even in what we often call the richest country in human history, almost 40 million people live in households that struggle to obtain enough food.

Inequality and economic hardship have long been characteristics of human civilization, at least since the advent of agriculture more than ten thousand years ago. At first glance, it might seem that wealthy people, who need money the least, should share some of their riches with everyone else. In fact, both Social Security and Medicare—the most popular federal government programs in existence—rely on a modest degree of redistribution. But this is not how the American political system works today. Instead, Republicans and most Democrats agree that competitive markets and economic growth are the best way to help both the 99 percent and the 1 percent—that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (a saying commonly attributed to President John F. Kennedy). As long as the total pie is getting bigger, the logic goes, each person will get a larger slice; therefore, what we should care about is overall economic growth.

This principle was the basis for the accommodation between labor and capital in the Western bloc after World War II. Workers’ parties abandoned the ideas of violent revolution and state control of the means of production, settling instead for workers’ rights, nationalization of a few key industries (in some European countries), and a generous welfare state. For the business sector, a robust social safety net was a fair price to pay for political stability and the preservation of capitalism. Instead of the government organizing production and then sharing everything more or less equally (“To each according to his needs,” in the words of Karl Marx), the private sector would be modestly regulated, people would make what they could earn in the market, and then tax-funded government programs would make sure no one was completely destitute. Even with a large degree of inequality, economic growth would make all social classes continually better off over time. The assembly-line worker in the automobile factory would earn only a fraction of what the company CEO took home, but his standard of living would rise over his lifetime, and he knew that the inexorable march of prosperity promised a better future for his children.

The rising tide was the theoretical basis for the “trickle-down economics” of President Ronald Reagan and the conservative revolution. In their view, the postwar American economy already suffered from too much redistribution; cutting taxes for the rich would encourage them to work, save, and invest, accelerating growth and therefore benefiting all people. But it was also the justification for the opposition’s New Democrat narrative of growth and opportunity. “This isn’t the time to get caught up in distributional politics,” Democratic Leadership Council Chair Charles Robb said in 1986—“it’s time to make the economic pie grow.”

Read more: https://prospect.org/takebackourparty/chapter-2-bad-policy/
(American Prospect)

[appalachiablue]

1. Interesting essays and conclusions Thanks for posting.

>"In the end, a Democratic Party traumatized by the Reagan Revolution and defined by its aversion to the words “socialist” and even “liberal” has proven powerless against the economic and political forces that have created this Second Gilded Age of monumental inequality. Flattered by its growing proximity with the economic elite and unwilling to do anything that might smack of class warfare, the party that was supposed to stand up for the working class instead took the side of markets and the overall economy, protesting that this was, in fact, the smarter, more sophisticated way to help all Americans. It wasn’t."

[malthaussen]

2. Good stuff.

The Centrists will hate it.

-- Mal