Proponents of supply-side theory promised us so much: unparallelled growth, more competition, more jobs, greater competition, a solid tax base, and basically sidewalks paved with gold.
We were promised that if we let the conservatives and the supply-siders take over, American freedom would flourish and our economy would be the envy of the world.
What we failed to see in 1980 was that we already had the planet's most vibrant economy and American liberty was the envy of the world.
We started shifting our tax base away from those in need and towards those who already have. We were promised that by giving our Treasury to the rich, they would create new businesses and new industries and the money we sent up would trickle down, like manna from Heaven.
The rich, instead, used the money to acquire their competitors, conglomerating industry, eliminating jobs, and acquiring levels of debt they could never repay.
At the same time, the supply-siders began re-writing the laws to prevent government oversight, and loaded the courts with activist judges whose objective was to allow business to avoid regulation and have freedom to ignore sound principles of actual capitalist theory.
We often hear these supply-side theories referred to as Reaganomics, named after the Hollywood elitist who championed the cause of supply-side theory.
So, we have spent a generation (twenty-eight years) pushing our Treasury resources up to the top (where they are not needed) and waiting for the benefits to trickle-down. Well, it seems that the captains of industry, the gods of supply-side theory, have drunk the nectar of our hard work, and now they are relieving themselves: they are pissing all over America, its Constitution, its government, and the basic tenets of American liberty.
The supply-side conservatives who retain their strangle-hold on our nation have us over a barrel.
They have run our economy into the ground and bankrupted us financially and morally.
And what is our next step? To give them a trillion or a trillion-and-a-half dollars from our Treasury in hopes that our economy can be saved.
We have no choice, of course. We have to give them the money, they have us over a barrel.
The question isn't whether we should give it to them; the question is how to avoid this happening again.
We have to re-regulate industry.
We have to strengthen the SEC and return to a culture of denying monopolistic takeovers and mergers, we have to restrict the number of broadcast licenses back to the levels of 1980, we need to stop conglomeration and the ridiculous debt maintenance that goes along with it, we have to return to selling standard mortgages to working people, and the list can go on.
Supply-siders and their apologists will tell you that the reason our economy is failing is that we have not de-regulated enough. Do you believe them? Has deregulation worked for you and your family?
Capitalism is like a raging river. It can be harnessed to provide a multitude of benefits for an open society, but left to its own devices it will just swallow and destroy everything in its path.
As a nation, we used capitalism to build a great society, a graceful society, a society envied by all. Then we handed it over to the supply-siders who, in one generation, have run it into the ground, making us a global embarrassment mired in avarice and pride.
Of course we have to bail-out industry and the rich. Capitalism always survives because socialism is always there to rescue it
1 comment:
Isn't it rich that Alan Greenspan, the free market genius Reagan appointed to be his point man on the whole trickle down boondoggle - and kept pushing it for nearly 20 long years as Fed Chairman! - just last month confessed to one teensy weensy little flaw he never considered before in his vaulted supply side theory: You can't trust people with too much money. MSNBC Online reported on Oct. 23, 2008:
"Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that 'a flaw in the model ... that defines how the world works.'" *
He seems to be admitting that he, like Reagan, never thought about the economy as anything to do with what we call "reality" or "the ways of the world!"
* http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27335454/
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