Teddy Bloggie Blog Blogging

You see, I believe that Republicans--in my particular issue areas, at least--were put on earth to take power occasionally and clean up the broken crockery dropped on the floor by the Democrats as they prepare the great social-democratic feast.

Specifically, I believe that on those (rare) occasions when it is appropriate for Republicans to hold power, it is their mission to:

• Get big corporations' and agribusinesses' snouts out of the government trough by deploying free-market laissez-faire rugged-individualist ideology against receivers of government subsidies.
• Take the extra pro-free trade steps that Democrats cannot take because they are hog-tied by the unions.



• Be fiscally prudent: run large budget surpluses so that if we ever do get into a situation where the government has to undertake a huge mission (like a big war, or a major reconstruction of some failed foreign nation, or keep our soon-to-be-aged baby boomers from getting kicked out of their hospital rooms), it can do it.



• Chant the supply-side mantra: broaden the base and lower the tax rates so that nobody faces confiscatory tax rates that will in the long run teach them that working harder is a fool's game.

But these people... these people who run our executive and now both legislative branches--they aren't doing their job:

• The farm bill was a major step backward--a big loss relative to the ground gained in 1996--as far as curbing what agribusiness sucked out of the trough was concerned.
• The steel tariff was very depressing: we Democratic free-traders had convinced Clinton and company that a lot more American businesses and workers benefit from the ability to buy potentially-cheaper steel from abroad than lose, and that a steel tariff would be a very bad idea. We win for eight years--and then Karl Rove convinces Bush that a steel tariff is just hunky-dory.
• The 2001 tax cut... Let me give you some marginal tax rates... a mother with two kids earning $24000: 68% (she loses the last of her food stamps, and her earned income tax credit phases out)... a doctor making $200,000: 36.4%... an executive making $1,000,000: 40%... Any decent supply-sider would say that the real place where marginal tax rates needed to be cut in 2001 was around the $25000 a year zone: the place where the phase out of the earned income credit makes marginal rates astronomical. We economist types were never able to interest Clinton and company in such a proposal--at a gut level, Clinton simply didn't get the importance of lower marginal rates so that people don't get hit in the nose by a 2 x 4 when they work more hours and the IRS snarfs most of it. Larry Lindsey is supposed to have led a charge to get a proposal to "deal with the EITC phaseout problem" into the 2001 tax bill, but he got absolutely nowhere. Bush, Cheney, and their personal staffs don't resonate with the problems of mothers of two making $12 an hour... mothers of two making $12 an hour don't give big to Republican presidential candidates, or show up at the $1000 a plate dinners that are what presidential candidates do day after day these days. So we got a tax cut that gives 40% of its notional dollars to those making more than $300,000 a year whose marginal tax rates are much lower than those of the mother of two earning $12 an hour. (Larry Lindsey keeps saying that they'll come back to it and fix it; but the word is that he's about to get "invited" to "spend more time with his family.")
• Long-run fiscal policy is a disaster in the making, as our surpluses melt away and are replaced by large long-run deficits (how large nobody knows yet). My biggest complaint about Reagan was always the deficit. A balanced budget during the 1980s would have freed up $200 billion a year that the government borrowed and made it available for investment. How much faster would the information technology revolution been taking place had that extra $200 billion a year of investment been there? And how much better could we have managed the end of the Cold War if budgets in the 1980s had been balanced?
• I remember in 1992 and 1993... when I wondered just why it was that (now that the Cold War was won) we weren't planning to send $50 billion a year ($200 per American per year) and 500,000 Americans to Russia to help them dismantle communism and build a decent economy and society. "It is the right thing to do," I thought. "The people of Russia have suffered horribly under communism for nearly a century. They deserve a break. And we all still owe an enormous unpaid debt to the workers of Magnitogorsk who built the T-34s and to Vatutin's tank crews who sealed up their vehicles and drove them across the bottom of the Dneiper's tributaries to outflank the Nazis at Kiev. Moreover," I thought, "it is the smart thing to do from the point of view of America's national security: after all, we want to avoid at all costs any risk of a 'Weimar Russia.'"

  The answers I got was that I was an idealistic fool. Reagan's deficits and the resulting accumulation of national debt in the 1980s had made it impossible to even propose such a thing...

  Now we seem to be heading back along the same road. And fifteen years from now the U.S. government may well face a similar urgent and necessary task to that of turning Russia into a prosperous democracy, and find once again that its president, looking at the debt and the deficit, will conclude that we have "more will than wallet."

So from my perspective--in my issue areas--this generation of Bushies are zero for four. Not only are they doing all the bad things that Republicans usually do, but they are doing none of the good things that Republicans are supposed to do...