Conservative Republicans Subscribe to Trickle Down Supply-side Economics - An Economic Theory That Has Never Worked Anywhere in the World, Ever

Conservative Republicans Subscribe to Trickle Down Supply-side Economics - An Economic Theory That Has Never Worked Anywhere in the World, Ever

In 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt gave his rousing “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he called for new approaches to dealing with the problems the nation faced. President Obama visited Osawatomie today, and in his own speech — his first major economic speech since Occupy Wall Street protests began highlighting income inequality and corporate greed — Obama called for a new approach to addressing America’s current economic challenges.

In the process, Obama fired a shot across the bow of 30 years of conservative economic theory, a shot that was sorely needed but has been left in the chamber by Democratic presidents and political leaders, Obama included, far too often. Trickle down economics, the conservative theory embraced by Ronald Reagan and virtually every conservative since, “doesn’t work,” Obama declared. And even as conservatives have clung to the idea in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, “it has never worked,” Obama added:

    Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.

    It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.


Obama is right. The trickle-down policies put in place since the Reagan administration haven’t brought prosperity to the middle- and working-classes; if anything, they have made prosperity an illusion for the vast majority of Americans who don’t directly benefit from them.

Tax cuts for the wealthy, primarily those passed by Republicans in 2001 and 2003, lowered rates for the richest Americans to historically low levels — but those cuts were followed by massive deficits and weak job growth, not the economic boom conservatives promised. Anti-regulatory policies helped lead to a predatory financial system that busted the housing market, nearly collapsed the financial industry, and threw America into a recession that largely spared — and even enriched — the nation’s wealthiest. At the same time, millions of lower- and middle-class Americans lost jobs, retirement funds, and any hope of economic prosperity in their lifetime. Under 30 years of trickle down policies, wage growth has stagnated even as CEO pay has boomed.

Unfortunately, Obama’s speech won’t be enough to make such policies disappear. Republicans continue to espouse the same ideas — loosening regulations and cutting taxes on the rich while slashing programs that benefit the working- and middle-classes — in their attempts to bring about recovery. If history is any indicator, however, those policies would again fail to boost job creation and economic growth. As Obama noted today, those policies don’t work, and they never have.

The Bush tax cuts were supposed to be like rocket fuel for the economy. We've had them for 10 years. Anyone from blue-collar working class to middle-class can look around and tell you those jobs were just unicorns and magic rainbows, not reality.

If Conservatives Love America How Come They Keep Butchering Our History

If Conservatives Love America How Come They Keep Butchering Our History

The mortgage crisis began in 2006 and it’s all President Obama’s fault—at least according to Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity recently blamed [1] Obama—“his policies, his economic plan, his fault”—for the mortgage crisis, ignoring who was actually president (that would be George W. Bush) as the housing market slipped [2].

Hannity’s is just one example of the selective memory and historical revision frequently on display in the conservative movement. Right-wing pundits, politicians and pseudo-historians are nibbling away at objective historical truths to rewrite history for present-day purposes, and hardly any topic is off-limits: glorifying the “Reagan Revolution” to children, sugarcoating the Jim Crow South and revising textbooks to offer a favorable view on Phyllis Schlafly—among many others.

Below, read about eight ways in which conservatives try to rewrite, sugarcoat or ignore aspects of American history.

1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery. Propelled to the front of the Republican field after her victory in the Iowa straw poll, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann’s historical views are notoriously error-prone. In one her infamous gaffes, she said [3] the founding fathers “work[ed] tirelessly to end slavery” (in fact, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves) and that John Quincy Adams [4] was a founding father—he was born in 1767.

Bachmann was a research assistant to John Eidsmoe for his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of our Founding Fathers, in which Eidsmoe wrote, “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God. In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.” And at a conference [5], Eidsmoe outlined his belief in church/state separation: “The church’s responsibility is to teach biblical principles of government and to drive sinners to the cross.... The function of the state is to follow those godly principles and preserve a system of order.” Bachmann has praised [6] Eidsmoe as “absolutely brilliant. He taught me about so many aspects about our godly heritage.”

2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal. Texas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is fond of pro-secession comments [7]; in 2009, he joked [8] that “we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

In his dreams. In fact, these attempts at humor sidestep what secession actually leads to: a nullification crisis, a Civil War, hundreds of thousands of casualties and the federal government as the victor anyway. And secession is illegal. In 1866 the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White [9] that Texas’s ordinance of secession was “absolutely null.”

Perry isn’t the only Republican to make such comments. Congressman Zach Wamp alluded [10] to secession and Georgia’s Senate passed [11] a secession-related bill in 2009.

3. Forgetting September 11? Conservatives have an uncanny ability to misremember when the September 11 attacks occurred. In July, Fox News [12] host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008?—?I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” (In his “apology [13],” he accepted no blame: “Yesterday, I misspoke when saying that there were no US terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11, but that is when the radical liberal left pounced on us…. thank you liberals for reminding me how petty you can be.”)

A surprising slip came from ex–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In January 2010 he claimed [14] that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.” In December 2009 Mary Matalin [15] made the outrageous claim that Bush inherited the attacks from Bill Clinton. In November 2009 Bush’s ex–Press Secretary Dana Perino [16] said “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”

4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History.” Mike Huckabee’s cartoon history series is whitewashing American history. While claiming to engage children in an easy-to-digest format without “misrepresentations…historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness,” personal biases somehow make an appearance [17]. Each video is produced with consultation from Learn Our History’s “Council of Masters;” one “Master,” Larry Schweikart, is the author of 48 Liberal Lies About American History, including “Lie #45: LBJ’s Great Society Had a Positive Impact on the Poor.”

In a DVD [18] on the “Reagan Revolution,” viewers are invited to “journey to a time when America suffered from financial, international and moral crisis:” Washington, DC, 1977. A knife-wielding African-American man demands “gimme yo’ money!” Ronald Reagan’s arrival—against triumphant music playing and a caption reading “one man transformed the nation…and the world”—changed all that for the better, the DVD suggests.

5. The New Deal did harm. Anti–New Deal views have long reverberated among Republicans. Bachmann [19] blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing “Hoot-Smalley Tariff” (never mind that it’s Smoot-Hawley and it was passed three years prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration). And a barrage of recent books, including FDR’s Folly, by Jim Powell of the Cato Institute, and Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, blame FDR and the New Deal for prolonging the Depression. Newt Gingrich has praised [20] The Forgotten Man, with its anti-stimulus message, as a blueprint for a return to “Whig-style free-market liberalism.”

Conservatives do not love America. Like ultra nationalist movements throughout history they love something pure that exists only in their imagination and made up history. This is not how mature adults love their country. Adults love their country acknowledging the warts, the wrong turns and try not to repeat the mistakes of the past. With their love of the treasonous Confederacy one can see that history's lessons are wasted on conservatives.  More examples at the link.

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

When Tea Party darling Herman Cain announced his candidacy for president in May, he decided to cite words from the U.S. Constitution to underline his key points. Unfortunately for Cain, he got his documents wrong. The passage he chose was from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

Cain is not alone. There seems to be an epidemic of Tea Party Republicans botching historical accounts of the founding of the United States. Since Independence Day celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and given the recent Tea Party problems with history, I thought it would be fitting to look a little closer at Cain's gaffe, as it has both symbolic and substantive importance regarding modern American politics.

Symbolically, Cain's problem with historical accuracy represents a major characteristic of the modern Tea Party-dominated Republican Party. Whether it is Sarah Palin's butchering of Paul Revere's role in the American Revolution, or Michele Bachmann's truly revisionist mangling of the facts to claim the founding fathers tried to abolish slavery (not to mention her belief that John Quincy Adams was a founding father, even though he was born in 1767), the Tea Party has shown a disdain for knowledge, facts and learning. History is not something set in stone, but rather something to be twisted and manipulated to support the immutable, ideological beliefs of the movement.

So if Palin or Bachmann plainly get American history wrong, the response isn't to admit it (after all, the statements are not debatable; Revere was not riding to warn the British, and slavery was enshrined as legitimate in the Constitution, notably through the three-fifths compromise). No, instead, their supporters tried to change history to match the statements of their leaders, which in 21st century practice means Palin supporters editing the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to reflect her mistakes, and Bachmann's followers doing the same for the page on John Quincy Adams.

The ignorance of Cain, Palin and Bachmann holds importance beyond a "gotcha" moment to demonstrate that these three individuals aren't up to the task of being president (similar to Mitt Romney's gaffe of telling an unemployed attendee at one of his events that he, too, was unemployed). More importantly, the lack of respect (or even caring about) facts, both by the candidates and their supporters, is indicative of the larger GOP approach to political positions. For example, Republicans support lower taxes for millionaires because that is what their core constituency and base ideology calls for, but they justify the position through unsustainable assertions that such tax cuts somehow create jobs, even though we know they don't (also here and here). Or, Republicans reject the existence of climate change to keep costs as low as possible for corporations regardless of the consequences, but justify their position by denying the existence of climate change, even though the overwhelming majority of scientists say it is real.

There are myriad issues for which Republicans rely on patently false assertions to back policy positions that may be otherwise unpalatable to the American public ("We're creating jobs" plays better than "Rich people shouldn't have to pay a lot in taxes"), but nowhere is this lack of respect for facts and history more prevalent than in the party's attacks on Barack Obama. Rather than oppose his policies on the merits, Republicans have engaged in a two-prong strategy of personal attacks meant to score political victories: First, they opposed every proposal made by the president, even if Obama called for the adoption of a policy once embraced by Republicans (i.e. becoming the Party of No, although I have argued they have evolved into the Party of F You).

Second, the right, including politicians and the right-wing, Fox News/Limbaugh propaganda echo chamber, has engaged in a coordinated assault to paint the president as being out of the American mainstream, regardless of the facts. They want you to think he is dangerous and un-American, that he was born in Kenya, and that his policy proposals are radical, and that he has no desire to keep Americans safe from terrorists with whom he actually sympathizes.

(Never mind that he has governed as a centrist and consistent with his campaign promises, which resulted in a hefty victory. For example, the stimulus package was smaller than many economists supported and included a ton of tax cuts; he didn't push for a single-payer system or even a public option as part of health care reform, instead getting behind a bill that pushed tens of millions of new customers into the hands of private insurance companies; and he stepped up the pursuit of Qaeda and Taliban targets, including drone attacks, taking out more terrorists than his predecessor, including Osama bin Laden.)

In right-wing rhetoric, the president is a threat to the American way of life, a socialist who wants to change traditional American values, even though there is no actual evidence to support these claims.

Why do these attacks matter? Well, that question segues nicely into the substantive problem with Cain's Constitution/Declaration gaffe, since the Tea Party regularly invokes an Obama attack on liberties, drawing on the Declaration of Independence (even if Cain thought he was citing the Constitution, not an insignificant error since the Constitution is the law of the land, providing a framework for our entire political system, while the Declaration is mainly historical in nature).

In his speech, Cain said:

"You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believe in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don't stop right there, keep reading. Cause that's when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We've got some altering and some abolishing to do."

This kind of language should sound familiar, since it is the bread and butter of Tea Party ideology. And Cain is right about what the Declaration says (well, he got the wrong document, but he got the right sequence of passages). The second paragraph of the Declaration begins:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And then the paragraph goes on to say:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Warms the cockles of the Tea Party heart, right? Well, with a little more perspective and examination, not so much. First of all, I'm sure it's no coincidence Cain stopped where he did, since the next line of the Declaration is:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

So yes, the Declaration supports "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" the government when it becomes "destructive" to "unalienable Rights." But not for "light and transient causes." What did the founding fathers think were big enough threats to warrant revolution? The answer is right in the Declaration, a laundry list of grievances that make up the bulk of the document. It is a litany of charges that the King of England had impinged on American liberties by, among other things, engaging in the hindering and dissolution of of legislative bodies, ignoring laws, preventing the adoption of laws (including, much to the Tea Party's disdain, I'm sure, the "Naturalization of Foreigners"), interfering with the judiciary, quartering English soldiers, interfering with trade, and imposing taxes without consent.

In short, the founding fathers bristled at being ruled by a dictatorial monarch. It is easy to see how in the over-hyped, rabid and, most importantly, false and historically inaccurate rhetoric of the Tea Party, such a connection would be apparent, from the tyranny of a King to a president looking to institute a socialist/Nazi/Islamist dictatorship in the United States.

Only, much like Bachmann's and Palin's lack of knowledge of our history, Cain (and it's not like he is the only Republican who talks about Obama's assault on our liberties) completely misunderstands and misapplies the content and context of the Declaration's call for revolution. Republicans can't seem to understand that if the president disagrees with them on how to address the country's roster of problems, it doesn't make him a tyrant. It's doubtful the founding father would look kindly on anyone trying to argue that the Obama presidency was comparable to the reign of King George III.

The language of the Declaration of Independence doesn't provide the support the Tea Party thinks it does.

(As an aside, the core charges of the Tea Party against Obama are all false: They complain about taxes, but Americans are experiencing their lowest tax burden since 1958, with taxes lower than they were under Reagan. They charge Obama with wanting to take away their guns, but the president hasn't signed a single piece of gun control legislation, nor did he veto bills with pro-gun provisions attached. I could go on and on.)

Cain (and Bachmann and Palin) getting history wrong isn't just about a funny media story. Rather, the Tea Party's ambivalence about facts and history is a necessary component of the GOP political strategy, as the party seeks to continue its drive since the 2010 elections to return the country to the 1920s (attacking social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, busting unions, cutting education, catering to corporate special interests and prioritizing eliminating abortion, all while further increasing the historically massive divide between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest of us). As Think Progress tweeted last week: "REMINDER: Current deficit + economy product of crisis created by deregulation + huge tax cuts. Solution isn't deregulation + huge tax cuts." (Just look at Tim Pawlenty's tax cut proposal, for example.)

Republicans, to win in 2012, are relying on Americans to forget history, not remember it.

So on this Independence Day, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, let's take the opportunity to read the document and better understand what it did (and did not) say, and, more importantly, against what the founding fathers were actually rebelling.

And let's try and stick to facts and accurate history when debating the issues. I know cognitive dissonance can be troubling for an ideologue, but here is a tip: If you find yourself literally trying to rewrite history, you're probably on the wrong side of a debate.

More often than not the facts of history support liberalism. A political philosophy espoused by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine. Maybe that is why rabid right-wing conservatives keep trying to rewrite history or invent their own.