Imposters in our politics
March 19, 2012
By Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
Anyone watching the Republican debates would think that George W. Bush never existed.
Bush, The-Man-Who-Never-Was, was the “reverse-Moses” of his country; he led the people out of peace, prosperity and growing budget surpluses into endless deficits and a trumped-up war; from a $280 billion surplus in Clinton’s last year to a $120 billion deficit in just one budget cycle.
Bush might label this “fuzzy math,” as he did any reference to numbers in his first campaign. We now know that a lot of things were fuzzy to Bush, including inconvenient facts and any concept of the truth. He has been airbrushed out of the Republican version of history in favor of a fictional version of Ronald Reagan, the great tax-cutter, who actually raised taxes 11 times while tripling the national debt from $900 billion to almost $3 trillion.
On the rare occasions when Bush is mentioned, it is with tut-tutting about the fact that he wasn’t a true conservative.
Indeed, he wasn’t. He almost doubled the size of government and refused to pay for his tax cuts, his two wars, and his prescription drug program. This was the pseudo-economic gospel of “supply side” economics promoted by charlatans and cranks, as Bush’s top economic advisor later termed them.
Despite the disastrous consequences of Bush’s policies, three Republican presidential candidates are still gripped by the same faux-conservative economic delusion, that endless tax cuts for the wealthy and more deregulation will fix everything.
We’ve had two tests of this theory in recent decades: Clinton’s 1993 tax hike, which helped produce 22 million jobs and a budget surplus, and the Bush tax cuts, which helped create $5 trillion more in debt and left us with 14 million unemployed, according to Ezra Klein, columnist for the Washington Post.
In Bush’s last year, the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 9 percent in late 2008, losing 700,000 jobs per month. Rick Santorum’s proposed budget would make the Bush tax cuts permanent at a cost of $3.8 trillion, add another tax cut that the non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates would cost $6 trillion over 10 years, and then use a “magic asterisk” to cut an unspecified $5 trillion within five years, no details provided.
Romney promises to enact an across-the-board, 20 percent rate cut for every American and abolish the “death tax” (the estate tax, paid only by the ultra-rich). A Tax Policy Center study in November showed that Romney’s policies would give the wealthiest 0.1 percent an average tax reduction of $264,000, while the poorest 20 percent would get $78, and those in the middle, $791 in reductions.
To promote their trickle-down policies, the plutocrats distract the witless and the gullible with racial resentment and imaginary tales of voter fraud, lazy immigrants and a fictional war on religion, while they simultaneously conduct partisan warfare against women, gays, Hispanics and blacks.
A recent poll showed that 52 percent of GOP voters in Mississippi think Obama is a Muslim. These are the people who demand small government except when they want the government to police prenatal testing or force intrusive sonograms on women; they oppose abortion and contraception but don’t understand the connection between unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The Guttmacher Institute has found that half of all abortions in America are accounted for by the small proportion of women and girls who aren’t using contraceptives. Yet, after the Republicans took over many state governments in 2010, they introduced more than 1,100 anti-choice or anti-birth control laws in 2011 and 450 more this year.
They have demonstrated their concern for the sanctity of life by crusading for fetal personhood, which would grant zygotes the same status as “people” that Mitt Romney has already bestowed on corporations, with no sense of irony. Like theocrats everywhere, they want to legislate their dogmas into law, and then use the power of the government to suppress opposition and control women.
Santorum has argued that “radical feminism” is encouraging women to work outside the home, and he has even promoted the idea that ignorance is preferable to a liberal education. His goal is apparently to return women to the 1950s.
The current crop of Chicken Hawks has taken another page from Bush’s disastrous playbook: Chest-thumping about war with Iran without any apparent regard for the consequences.
As three-time Pulitzer-winning columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote: “America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts.”
What the country needs is the sober, fiscally conservative Republican party of Eisenhower, not these socially-reactionary, double-talking conservative imposters.
By Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
Anyone watching the Republican debates would think that George W. Bush never existed.
Bush, The-Man-Who-Never-Was, was the “reverse-Moses” of his country; he led the people out of peace, prosperity and growing budget surpluses into endless deficits and a trumped-up war; from a $280 billion surplus in Clinton’s last year to a $120 billion deficit in just one budget cycle.
Bush might label this “fuzzy math,” as he did any reference to numbers in his first campaign. We now know that a lot of things were fuzzy to Bush, including inconvenient facts and any concept of the truth. He has been airbrushed out of the Republican version of history in favor of a fictional version of Ronald Reagan, the great tax-cutter, who actually raised taxes 11 times while tripling the national debt from $900 billion to almost $3 trillion.
On the rare occasions when Bush is mentioned, it is with tut-tutting about the fact that he wasn’t a true conservative.
Indeed, he wasn’t. He almost doubled the size of government and refused to pay for his tax cuts, his two wars, and his prescription drug program. This was the pseudo-economic gospel of “supply side” economics promoted by charlatans and cranks, as Bush’s top economic advisor later termed them.
Despite the disastrous consequences of Bush’s policies, three Republican presidential candidates are still gripped by the same faux-conservative economic delusion, that endless tax cuts for the wealthy and more deregulation will fix everything.
We’ve had two tests of this theory in recent decades: Clinton’s 1993 tax hike, which helped produce 22 million jobs and a budget surplus, and the Bush tax cuts, which helped create $5 trillion more in debt and left us with 14 million unemployed, according to Ezra Klein, columnist for the Washington Post.
In Bush’s last year, the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 9 percent in late 2008, losing 700,000 jobs per month. Rick Santorum’s proposed budget would make the Bush tax cuts permanent at a cost of $3.8 trillion, add another tax cut that the non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates would cost $6 trillion over 10 years, and then use a “magic asterisk” to cut an unspecified $5 trillion within five years, no details provided.
Romney promises to enact an across-the-board, 20 percent rate cut for every American and abolish the “death tax” (the estate tax, paid only by the ultra-rich). A Tax Policy Center study in November showed that Romney’s policies would give the wealthiest 0.1 percent an average tax reduction of $264,000, while the poorest 20 percent would get $78, and those in the middle, $791 in reductions.
To promote their trickle-down policies, the plutocrats distract the witless and the gullible with racial resentment and imaginary tales of voter fraud, lazy immigrants and a fictional war on religion, while they simultaneously conduct partisan warfare against women, gays, Hispanics and blacks.
A recent poll showed that 52 percent of GOP voters in Mississippi think Obama is a Muslim. These are the people who demand small government except when they want the government to police prenatal testing or force intrusive sonograms on women; they oppose abortion and contraception but don’t understand the connection between unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The Guttmacher Institute has found that half of all abortions in America are accounted for by the small proportion of women and girls who aren’t using contraceptives. Yet, after the Republicans took over many state governments in 2010, they introduced more than 1,100 anti-choice or anti-birth control laws in 2011 and 450 more this year.
They have demonstrated their concern for the sanctity of life by crusading for fetal personhood, which would grant zygotes the same status as “people” that Mitt Romney has already bestowed on corporations, with no sense of irony. Like theocrats everywhere, they want to legislate their dogmas into law, and then use the power of the government to suppress opposition and control women.
Santorum has argued that “radical feminism” is encouraging women to work outside the home, and he has even promoted the idea that ignorance is preferable to a liberal education. His goal is apparently to return women to the 1950s.
The current crop of Chicken Hawks has taken another page from Bush’s disastrous playbook: Chest-thumping about war with Iran without any apparent regard for the consequences.
As three-time Pulitzer-winning columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote: “America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts.”
What the country needs is the sober, fiscally conservative Republican party of Eisenhower, not these socially-reactionary, double-talking conservative imposters.
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