Lying just beneath Mitt Romney's dismissal of nearly half the electorate at a high-dollar fundraiser in May is an admission not as immediately damaging, but perhaps more important in the long run.
Romney told his donors back then that his campaign's political calculation assumes people who do not pay federal income taxes will not be interested in a candidate who proposes tax cuts. But that ignores the decades-long argument that the GOP has employed on behalf of tax cuts -- that wealth in the private sector will "trickle down"and spur economic growth, and therefore benefit everybody. If trickle-down economics is true, Romney should have no problem selling it to all the people who will supposedly benefit.
Unless he doesn't buy it either.The Huffington Post
Mitt Romney's Secret Fundraiser Remarks Put The Lie To Supply-Side Economics
Ryan Grim
Ryan, many people on the right really do believe that the Democrats have managed to "privilege" the lazy with "welfare" in order to guantee their votes. They think that trickle down hasn't worked only because with liberal welfare the lazy won't work even when there are jobs with possible riches waiting if they "work hard enough." When the elderly and students are mentioned, they respond that that's not who they mean. Then, the red state statistics are rolled out, and they say that's not who they mean either.
Who do they mean then? This is at bottom a racially bigoted position that plays to the "white vote," which is the GOP constituency. It's about "putting people in their place."
7 comments:
Tom, i just read this "from our man on the ground in scandinavia,Lars Palson Syll,it was a good one.
"Greg Mankiw’s stochastic mumbo jumbo on rising inequality"
http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/greg-mankiws-stochastic-mumbo-jumbo-on-rising-inequality/
Yes, that was a good one Lars picked up on. I recommend reading his blog regularly.
Notice that Mankiew says, in effect, Well, I haven't actually done the research, but..... At least he is honest about that.
Mankiw has to walk a tightrope between current reality and the future prospect of a Republican appointment (to Fed chair, say). He knows the score but watches what he says. Remember that leaked memo Larry Summers wrote after he polled various economists on how big the stimulus package should be?
Everybody gave a number (with Dean Baker the voice of reason by saying north of $900B a year) except that Mankiw refused to be pinned down. I give him points for recognizing that Summers would write down whatever he said in a memo that would someday be leaked to the press. That sort of prescience should be commended.
:o)
The real problem with this veiled racism (and that's what it is) is its so damn inefficient. In a democracy, scapegoating hits the law of diminishing returns as it approaches half the population.
"You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/we-are-all-welfare-queens-now/262512/
NIce reference, beowulf. Thanks for providing it.
I notice that it's gathered over 500 comments there already.
In just a few short paragraphs, that Atlantic article really nails it. In a way I've not been able to get my head around and articulate.
And it finally answers the question I find myself asking with more and more urgency these days: How did we get here?
Simple arithmetic puts the lie to trickle-down economics.
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