A lot has been said already. For me, this was the culmination of a decades-long process where the Democrats sold out their progressive agenda and happily embraced the Republican’s neoliberal economic policies. For some of the best analysis, see here, here, here and here.
My own view is that the Democrats have not had an economic policy of their own for nearly half a century, just an ‘inferior’ version of what Republicans usually champion—tax cuts on the wealthy, dismantling the public safety-net, ‘fighting’ inflation by creating unemployment, market liberalization and deregulation across the board, which among other things brought us a colossal financial sector that has cannibalized the productive economy.
Democrats need to grapple with the reality that Bill Clinton completed the Reagan revolution, and what we got from both parties is rabid financialization, extreme inequality, corporate welfare, joblessness, and economic insecurity: precisely the conditions that fan the flames of social antagonism and deep-seated racism and bigotry. There are many ways to tell this story but, just think, the real incomes of the vast majority of US households have barely moved in the last two decades. Most of us live in stagnation (at best) and many communities are mired in an ongoing recession (even depression), while the economy is ‘officially’ growing.
Neo-liberalism on steroids
As vile as Trump’s campaign was, many of his supporters have legitimate gripes about the state of the economy and about big money in politics. Of course, the notion that Trump is the ‘man of the people’ who will deliver the kind of change they (we) need is preposterous. In fact, his entire economic platform is basically the one I already described above. Nothing has changed. It is the same old plain vanilla “trickle-down economics” we know too well.…New Economic Perspectives
Pavlina Tcherneva | Assistant Professor of Economics at Bard College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability
See also
Mother Jones
We Are All Keynesians Now
Kevin Drum
2 comments:
I don't see all of the overt racism that Pavlina Tcherneva sees in Trump. I know that Trump spoke against illegal immigrants, excuse me "undocumented workers," but they are illegal no matter what spin you put on it. I don't know what Trump will do any more than Tcherneva does but there is a chance that he will make mistakes and learn from them. I don't think that there is any chance that Clinton has learned from her mistakes. Judging from what I've seen from her foreign policy it may be that the best part of the election is that we may not end up in a nuclear war with Russia and China. That way we may all be around to have another election in four years. I hope the democrats do some soul searching and come up with a real candidate next time.
Rebuilding infrastructure is definitely not "trickle down" economics. Some of his proposals are more of the same, but not that.
And, agreed with GLH, them most important thing is that the world may have just avoided nuclear Armageddon.
Post a Comment