09 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
The VodkaPundit requested someone to Fisk this piece of socialist caca so I have. I hope it meets with general approval
Ronald Reagan changed America, and -- with all due deference to his dedication to principle, his indomitable spirit, his affability -- not for the better.
I come not to praise Reagan but to bury him. And then urinate on his grave. You see he demonstrated that whiny left-wingers like me were both wrong and hypocritical.
Historians will argue how much credit Reagan deserves for the ratcheting down of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. By any measure he surely merits some, even if he spent the better part of his presidency ratcheting the Cold War up.
Reagan won the cold war by cheating! outspending your opponent just isn't fair!
But however much Reagan helped wind down the Cold War abroad, he absolutely revived class war here at home. Slashing taxes on the rich, refusing to raise the minimum wage and declaring war on unions by firing air traffic controllers during their 1981 strike, Reagan took aim at the New Deal's proudest creation: a secure and decently paid working class.
Of course as a highly paid columnist I happily donate the additional 35% of my wages that I would have been taxed before Reagan to charities that support solidarity with my working-class brethren. And I never ever shop at WalMart or Targ� because they don't sell caviar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htreat their employees so badly.
Broadly shared prosperity was out; plutocracy was dug up from the boneyard of bad ideas. The share of the nation's wealth held by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose by 5 percent during Reagan's presidency, while virtually everyone else's declined.
Of course the fact that even the poorest members of our society were better off when Reagan left than when he started is barely worth mentioning. Its much fairer if we all have equal shares of a single cupcake than variable shares in an enormous cake.
You need look no further than the current recovery to see Reagan's lasting effect on our economy. Corporate profits have been rising handsomely for the past couple of years, at roughly a 30 percent annual rate. But over two years into the recovery, wages are limping along at roughly the rate of inflation, gaining 1 to 2 percent annually. With the percentage of American workers who belong to unions -- 12 percent overall and just 8 percent in the private sector -- having sunk to its lowest level since before FDR, is it any wonder that wages are stuck?
You know these capitalists are complete swine and utterly failed to cut wages during a recession like they are supposed to so the only thing I can complain about is that workers don't get more money than for the same amount of work. Likewise I can't complain about the unemployment rate since the unemployment rate has been dropping like a stone ever since the unions lost their power so I'll complain about the unions losing their power instead.
Roughly a quarter of American workers belonged to unions when Reagan took office. When he broke the PATCO strike, it was an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers,
It was an unambiguous signal that attempted extortion, blackmail and coercion doesn't always work.
and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad. Reagan may have preached traditional values, but loyalty was not one of them.
The jobs shipped abroad is clearly indicated by the fact that unemployment is now lower than ever and that there are so many illegal immigrants who also seem to survive by working even though all the factories disappeared.
In his efforts to return capitalism to its previously unlamented Hobbesian past, Reagan had plenty of company. His helpmeet Maggie Thatcher made similar changes on her side of the pond. Throughout the advanced capitalist nations, the power of workers weakened as the old industrial economies ceased to expand and global investment began to outrun the constraints of the state. But nowhere was the force of investment stronger and the force of labor weaker than in the United States. The explosion of the trade deficit, no less than the budget deficit, dates to Reagan's morning in America.
Funny how the US economy is so much more healthy than those statist ones in Europe. In terms of growth rates and GDP/capita the US has out-performed the worker's paradises. Surely this is mere chance! (see Source ).
Reaganomics reflected the rise of Sunbelt capitalism -- of right-to-work-state businessmen who, unlike their Northern counterparts, had never cottoned at all to unions or regulations. From Reagan's dictum that government is the problem to Tom DeLay's equation of the Environmental Protection Agency with the Gestapo, the idea that there are higher purposes than private profit, or gainful pest extermination, has been banished from modern Republicanism.
The government is good! If it weren't for the government and the lobbyists I'd have to buy my own meals instead of freeloading off them. Everybody knows that all bureaucrats are selfless idealists who never ever lie or waste money or do anything except help the people, thats why the EU with all its wonderful bureacracy has so much lower levels of investment and growth than the US.
And though Reaganomics may have begun in the backwaters of American capitalism, it soon spread to Wall Street, which has rewarded our current Reaganaut, George W. Bush, with more money for his campaign than any other sector. Scrap the taxes on dividends, and that musty financial oversight, and watch finance become the political clone of the oil bidness.
Another set of people who won't buy me lunch because they can't stand me.
By letting business be business in its pre-New Deal mold -- free to speculate and shed longtime employees -- Reagan and his acolytes not only transformed the classic Northeastern capitalists. They also drove from their ranks the Willkie-Eisenhower-Rockefeller-Nixon Republicans who were the traditional GOP's political tribunes. In this the Reaganites succeeded all too well.
Reagan didn't mean to destroy the moderate wing of Republicanism per se, or to root the party in Southern states exclusively. To be sure, his primary opponents in 1968, 1976 and 1980 -- Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, the senior Bush -- were moderates against whom he ran up big vote totals in the South. But each time Reagan selected a vice president -- in 1976 he announced he'd pick liberal Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker if he won the nomination; in 1980, he picked George H.W. Bush -- he went with pillars of the Northeastern GOP establishment.
So ahh Reagan actually did nothing at all to destroy moderate Republicanism. But its still his fault that Bush and Clinton had a base in Hicksville instead of being urban sophisticates like me
By the time George W. Bush chose his fellow Houstonian Dick Cheney as his running mate, though, the Republicans had no Northeastern establishment remaining. Progressives had been banished; the socially tolerant had fled. Bush heads a party in which recent national leaders -- most certainly the trifecta of Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott and Tom DeLay -- are Southern right-wingers contemptuous of the traditions of both Roosevelts and not too crazy about the civil rights revolution of the '60s, either. Today's party narrowly clings to power in every branch of government, but it refuses to govern with, or listen to, anyone outside its ever-smaller tent. The post-Reagan Republicans have now shrunk to the party of culture war as well as class war -- to the nation's general woe.
Well known southern states such as New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Utah helped put Bush into power in 2000 (Source). All those horrible poxy states with no coastline that get in the way when I fly to LA or Frisco.
Its just NOT FAIR! All these nasty people who don't understand that they would be better off without the SUV and the 3-car garage. I mean really. If they weren't so rich then I wouldn't get stuck in traffic so much. And you know that's all Reagan's fault for destroying the government agencies that would have kept them poor for their own good.
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