"Words that make actions speak louder."
There’s another chapter to add to the narrative my colleague Dave Johnson sketched out some weeks ago about how the Reagan revolution has come home to roost, based on sobering statistics uncovered by David Cay Johnston.
Washington is inundated with deficit commissions. The country has piled up a huge debt because we cut taxes for the wealthy and borrowed to make up the difference. But everyone says we can’t fix the problem by raising taxes on the rich in a recession because taxes “take money out of the economy.” Is there […]
The deficit commission report issued last week is another Saturday night special pressed to the temple of the American middle class. “Turn over your money and your benefits or your country will die,” the report screams at workers. “You want your country to go bankrupt? No? Then you gotta delay retirement, get less from Social […]
The recession ended in June, 2009? What? Seriously? No one told the millions of unemployed. And last week we got more bad news: 44 million of us living in poverty, and that was last year, before unemployment and COBRA subsidies started running out for the unemployed, … four million additional Americans found themselves in poverty […]
To lift the economy, we have to lift wages. Increased wages will restore demand. The changes that will increase wages will help restore democracy. The social contract used to be that citizens in our democracy share the benefits of our economy through increased wages that come from increases in productivity. This broke down and working […]
“Watch what we do, not what we say.” (Famous Republican advice.) The Reagan Revolution was first and foremost about cutting the taxes paid by the rich and corporations. Now, almost 30 years later, the United States of America is drowning in debt. And that is exactly what they wanted to happen. The Plan There were […]
The conservative argument of the last 30-40 years boils down to this: “Hey look at this big pile of seed corn. Let’s eat it!” Almost 30 years after the “Reagan Revolution” our infrastructure is crumbling around us. Since the Reagan-era tax cuts we have been deferring maintenance of (and never mind modernizing) our infrastructure, and […]
Dave Johnson’s post on the broken contract that’s allowed private interests to siphon off our public wealth for the past 30 years is incredibly important. His basic argument is this: We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, […]
Cut spending? Wait – where did that terrible idea come from? Government is We, the People and its job is to protect and empower us. Why in the world would we want to cut back on that? WSJ today, The Bush Tax Cuts and the Deficit Myth, “Runaway government spending, not declining tax revenues, is […]
Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting. Two days before Christmas, with hardly anyone at all paying much attention, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office delivered […]