But first, a short roundup:
I've got a new Think Again here, "Remember Iraq?"
60% disapprove of his handling of Iraq and 59% disapprove of his handling of the economy. Guess who? (Why does America hate America?)
The NORAD Tapes, here
Yglesias adds some good critical analysis to J-Pod's new pro-genocide position on running the Middle East: brutal crackdown and massacres can be effective in the context of an on-going process of tyrannical repression and brutal dictatorship. Less so if you so don't want to run a police state permanently, which probably undermines the argument in favor of indiscriminate mass-killing as a means of democratization and liberalization.
And yes, the collapse of the neocon vision of forcible democratization does seem to glide rather effortlessly into an embrace of genocide and mass slaughter.
So mass slaughter in the service of democratization to mass slaughter in the service of mass slaughter, or what I guess we could call the transition from incidental or pragmatic genocide to a more principled genocide.
Aha! We finally nailed it down: Every single contributor to the Pennsylvania Green Party Senate candidate is actually a conservative -- except for the candidate himself.
Is there a more despicable human being than David Horowitz? (Nominations: Gibson? Coulter? Cheney? Sullivan? Jpod? Rabbi Daniel Lapin? Bin-Laden? Blogofascists? Discuss....)
Another administration criminal (There goes that lovely "evil twin" theory.)
Harold Myerson on Peter Beinart, here.
Quinnipiac today has Lamont up 54-41. As much as I detest pointing this out, Tomasky called a blowout on Monday. Not bad. (Call it "Nomentum.")
Fox News, outflanking the Israeli government, continues to raise doubts that Israel bombed Qana.
More proof of God's non-existence: Tom Friedman's a Billionaire
Today's Altercation Book Club selection is Norton Garfinkle's "The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy, which is not yet out, but is soon to be published later this month by Yale University Press. It was originally called to my attention by Bill Moyers, who calls it, "the most important book I've read in years. Thoughtful, clear, readable, and insightful, it is a remarkable account of how reactionary politics and regressive supply-side economics have produced an America that is no longer working for all Americans. But this is no hand-wringing polemic. Garfinkle has identified and diagnosed the virus that has been loosed on the American Dream, but he also summons us to fight back--with the ideas and values that may yet redeem in our time the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's vision of government 'of, by, and for the people.'"
The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy, by Norton Garfinkle
Every important economic policy has three kinds of consequences: factual, moral, and political. In evaluating economic policy, we have to ask three questions: (1) Does it work? (2) Is it fair? and (3) Will it sustain the democratic structure of our society?
Today debate tends to focus almost exclusively on the first question, at the expense of the other two. It was not always so. A generation ago, most Americans instinctively understood the relevance of all three questions--factual, moral, and political. That is because public views of government economic policy were shaped by memories of the Great Depression, which brought dramatic policy failure on all three levels.
Most Americans became convinced of three things: the government under President Hoover did not know what it was doing; the fate meted out to ordinary workers and their families was patently unfair; and unemployment and spreading poverty threatened the very basis of American democracy.
After the economy recovered in World War II, Americans were still thinking within this framework. Demand-side economics, inspired by economist John Maynard Keynes, became a kind of unofficial economic policy in the postwar years. The main lesson economists drew from Keynes was that government could restore growth to an economy suffering from high unemployment by engaging in deficit spending to increase "aggregate demand." Expanded demand would provide customers for business, give investors a reason to invest, bring down unemployment, and support a growing economy.
By the beginning of President Dwight Eisenhower's administration in 1953, demand-side economics had become the basis for a bipartisan consensus. The post-World War II economy was understood to be "Everyman's economy"" the purpose of the economy was to provide economic opportunities as well as a measure of economic security for ordinary workers and their families. Government was understood to have an active role--indeed, a responsibility--in this process.
The demand-side consensus constituted the basis of an economy that saw a remarkable growth of the American middle class. It was an economy in which ordinary workers in ordinary jobs could expect to better their conditions, own homes and automobiles, send their children to college, and retire in relative security. It was an economy in which the vast majority of citizens had a stake. It was an economy that promoted a strong faith in democracy.
Supply-side economics as propounded by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush created, in effect, a mirror image of demand-side theory. The real engine of growth in an economy was not demand, said the supply-siders, but rather supply. Supply-siders believed that demand-siders had put too much emphasis on the issue of fairness and in the process had neglected job 1: to make the economy grow. Government should not be worrying about ensuring an Everyman's economy or building up the middle class. It should simply get its hands off business and the economy and let business and the economy generate growth. The most important way for government to get its hands off the economy was to lower taxes, especially on the highest income taxpayers. The supply-siders claimed, incorrectly, that most high-income people owned their own businesses and would use their increased income to increase production by hiring new workers and purchasing new equipment. Many supply-siders claimed such tax cuts would so powerfully unleash the forces of supply that the tax cuts would not even produce a deficit: they would pay for themselves in increased tax payments.
It was one thing for supply-siders to claim to emphasize the factual dimension of economic issues at the expense of the moral and the political questions. That was simply a debating posture. It was another thing to actually have a factual basis for their claims.
As the new millennium dawned in 2000, the American economy presented an extraordinary portrait of success. For the previous four years, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had grown at an average real rate of 4.2 percent, a figure well above the 3.2 percent average for the post-World War II era. Unemployment, at 4.2 percent, was well below the postwar average. Inflation was minimal. To top it off, by the end of 2000, the federal government had produced surpluses for three consecutive years--a minor miracle, not seen since the late 1940s. From 1993 through 2000, the U.S. economy created over 23 million new jobs. The federal government was not only able to pay down trillions in accumulated debt; it had money left over to help cope with looming crises in Social Security and Medicare.
Then came the new policymakers. President George W. Bush came to office in 2001 with a minority of the popular vote, a razor-thin electoral vote margin, and a radical plan to slash the federal taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. Between 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration pushed through major cuts in the top marginal income tax rate, the estate tax, corporate taxes, and taxes on dividends and capital gains. By 2004, the administration's tax cuts had trimmed over $200 billion from the federal government's annual revenues, with most of the money going to those in the top 12 percent of the income scale.
Yet the results were not what the president and his advisers predicted. First to disappear were the projected federal surpluses. From a surplus of $256 billion in 2000, the federal budget went to a deficit of $413 billion in fiscal year 2004 and $319 billion in 2005. In the five years of the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005, the economy created only 31,000 new jobs per month, compared to 240,000 per month during the eight years of President Bill Clinton's administration. Business investment growth during the first five years of the Bush administration averaged only 0.1 percent per year, compared to 9.9 percent per year during the Clinton presidency. During the Bush administration the average annual GDP growth of 2.4 percent was considerably lower than the average annual growth of 3.7 percent during the eight Clinton years. Annual employment growth was anemic at 0.3 percent compared to 2.4 percent during the Clinton years.
After five years of their ambitious tax-cutting program, the central claim of Bush and his advisers--that tax cuts for the wealthiest would create a new economic environment fostering historically high rates of investment, job creation, and growth--had not panned out. The crowning irony was that the sustained boom of the 1990s had been ushered in by a major tax increase during the Clinton administration while the Bush tax cuts produced nothing of the kind.
The data clearly show that regressive tax policies based on a Gospel of Wealth supply-side theory are not helpful to economic growth, while progressive tax policies based on demand-side theory can provide a continuing spur to economic growth consistent with the economic, moral, and political vision of the middle-class American Dream.
One thing is clear: Americans must understand the profoundly different directions in which policies based on the supply-side Gospel of Wealth and policies based on the middle-class American Dream will take them. Political leaders seeking to serve the common good must reawaken our understanding of the true American Dream and remind us again of what Lincoln meant when he expressed the profound hope that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
More about it here.