I’m with Joel, in that I didn’t agree a whole lot with Jack Kemp. I freely admit that he and his brand of economic libertarianism were awfully compelling, but I could never buy into the most alluring feature of his Ayn Rand/Chicago School style Reaganomics: its simplicity.
It was hard for me to believe, as Kemp genuinely did, that tax cuts for the rich would eventually trickle down to the rest of us, and I’m confident in asserting that the past couple decades of an ever widening economic divide have proven my doubts well founded. So why, considering how much I opposed his policies and dreaded his unfulfilled ascendancy, did I not only bother to briefly commemorate his passing, but follow up with this second post?
Yes, as I previously wrote, in light of the GOP’s recent and disastrous collapse, I do view libertarians like Kemp (and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld) as a tremendous missed opportunity for his party to seize upon a potent political theme that could have kept Republicans competitive, if not dominant, for decades to come. And I’m thankful for their fumble.
But Kemp’s passing also deserves notice because he represented the sort of politician who was rare even in his day, and who is almost entirely absent amongst the leadership of the 21st century Republican Party… one whose policies you can hate, but whose character you can respect. Perhaps it was his competitive experience as a top athlete, or perhaps it was simply who he was, but unlike many Republicans today, Kemp always seemed able to distinguish between an opponent and an enemy.
I don’t remember Kemp ever attempting to paint Democrats and their supporters as cowards, traitors, terrorists or worse, and so he never earned the type of enmity by example that liberals like me now justly hold for so many of his Republican colleagues. And if more Republicans had followed Kemp’s example in both substance and style, I wonder if his party would be in the dire straits it finds itself in today?
Kemp was definitely a bit before Gingrich’s time. Quite a bit. And his district in the southtowns of Buffalo, NY had a decent portion of Democratic voters. He was kept in office by Raygun Dems.
Oh LOL! With a middle name like “FRENCH” – no way could he appeal to the Faux News trained seals that make up the 21 percent crowd these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kemp
The bottom line is, yes, the party would be in roughly the same boat it is now.
Reaganomics does NOT work. It’s proven itself to absolute failure. Democrats were powerless to stop the conservatives from implementing fully the Reagan doctrine of economics.
We went from the most prosperous of times, pay as you government, and paying down the national debt to bankruptcy.
The “social” issues that Bush and the Republicans ran on are what we Liberals despise most.
But, the economic policies that lead to our nations financial collapse is something all Americans will take not of. And, they will set aside their social issues when their pocketbooks are being decimated.
Couple the financial disaster with the hateful social issues and the party of no ideas and you have the logical conclusion of conservatism.
Failure.
“dire straights” [in the last sentence of the essay]
Common spelling error or commentary on the homophobic GOP?
re 3: Good call! They are certainly not the sultans of swing, are they?
N @3,
No… I’m just a crappy proof reader.
Tax cuts for the rich don’t trickle down to ordinary Americans at all. The Bush tax cuts produced virtually no jobs. What needs to trickle down to workers is wage increases.
U.S. wages have been stagnant or declining since 1950. Over the same period millions of high-paying factory jobs have been replaced by low-paying service jobs.
The steady decline in workers’ incomes have eroded the foundation of our consumption-based economy, which was kept going for a while by cheap and readily available credit, but that wasn’t sustainable and couldn’t — and didn’t — last.
Twenty-five years ago, workers got about 60% of GDP and capital got roughly 40%. Under 25 years of Reaganism, that distribution was reversed and workers, who comprise most of America’s population, now get less than half of the nation’s economic output. It’s not because workers are lazier, or less education, or aren’t working as hard; it’s because cheap labor conservatives determinedly beat down wages and kept more for themselves.
The chickens are now coming home to roost. Republican business owners are in the process of learning that when you beat down wages, there are fewer customers for their goods and services. People who make less money ultimately are forced to spend less money, and that translates into a shrinking economy.
But you can’t convince stupid conservatives that less for workers means less for them, too. The logical consequences of shrinking consumer purchasing power escapes them because they’re not logical people. Conservatives are enamored with paper economic theories that don’t work. Because they have no grounding in reality and ignore the lessons of practical experience, if something looks good on paper, they’ll strap it on and jump off a cliff with it.
http://www.ssplprints.com/lowr...../96048.jpg
The problem is, they want to take the rest of us with them. And that’s why voting Republican is an act of personal suicide.
The most common argument for cutting the taxes of the rich is to increase investment. But this argument is bogus. The U.S. economy is awash with surplus capital; that’s why the interest paid on savings is close to zero. There’s trillions of dollars in idle capital sitting in Treasuries, earning almost nothing, because there’s no place to invest it.
Granted, this isn’t always true; there are times when the economy can absorb, or even needs, more capital. But why should tax cuts to free up investment capital be given to the rich? Why not give those tax cuts to workers, so they have a chance to accumulate more retirement savings, own more stock, start their own businesses, etc.? Why should the rich have special investment incentives that workers don’t get? Why not the other way around — why not broaden the country’s wealth base by encouraging more investment at the bottom and middle tiers of the income pyramid?
The rich have gotten plenty of tax cuts to spur investments. Now it’s the workers’ turn to get tax breaks and accumulate savings and investments. What should be done now is the Republican tax policies of the last 25 years should not merely be reversed, they should be inverted, with those at the bottom getting the tax breaks the rich got and those at the top getting the tax increases the working class got.
If only that right wing-nut president kennedy didn’t start that foolishness we wouldn’t be where we are today.
@8 It must be a slow news day in LA. You’d think in a city that big something would happen to tear Marvin away from this site…
re 8: So, what’s your point? Times change.
9 You’re assuming “Marvin” lives where he says he does.
@ 10
So, what’s your point?
Apparently Marvin thinks that a tax cut that went into effect in 1964 was responsible for spurring a period of economic growth that began in 1961.
8 It looked like it was working for Kennedy because the economy was in so much better shape then–at that time the earning power of the average American was still rising, and would continue to do so for yet another decade. What long-term effect Kennedy’s policies might have had were buried under the greater influence of massive Federal spending on the race to the moon, the Vietnam war and the War on Poverty.
The Reagan years began with a serious stumble in the economy, followed by a recovery driven by “Star Wars” as an excuse to funnel massive amounts of (deficit-driven) cash into the aerospace industry.
In similar fashion, the Bushistas covered the negative effect of more tax cuts for the rich with a couple of wars that put a bunch of underpaid, underequipped grunts on the ground on the other side of the planet as cover for funnelling lots and lots of military pork to Halliburton and its ilk to provide inedible food, undrinkable water and electrified showers. Even that didn’t really work, so the banks were allowed to do all sorts of “creative” things to help Americans hock their great grandchildrens’ birthright to extend the game for a few more innings.
this:
should have read:
You’ve been here long enough to know better. Lee and goldy have both verified my ip is from so cal.
What the Republican mantra of “tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts” got us was a doubling of the federal debt from $5 trillion to over $10 trillion between January 2001 and January 2009.
Right on Roger. You and I have differences but your posts at 6 and 7 are good. I’m conservative but that translates into fiscal conservancy not this neo-con BS.
Smaller govt. footprint to me means more money in the private sector. States making their own decisions means money better spent than blanket US legislation.
Kennedy and the Democrats in Congress were lowering income tax rates that had peaked at 90% for the highest income bracket in order to pay for WWII. Weird, huh? In the OLD days, when there was a war we RAISED TAXES TO PAY FOR IT.
Anyway, because we were the only intact major industial power on earth we were rolling in dough and could afford to lower them. Not so now.
Goldy, your simplicity argument and the errant path of the GOP brings to mind the great NeoCon metaphor Walter Sobchak. “Thaaat’s right, Dude. The beauty of this is its simplicity.”
The reference to laissez-faire capitalism being “simplistic” is, itself, a simplistic analysis. Individual Americans and corporations literally make millions of economic decisions daily. It’s simplistic to the infinite degree to assume government regulations could even begin to process this information unless you had a total/infinite dictatorship.
Adam Smith’s famous description of “an invisible hand” (mostly to placate the religious establishment in his time and place)actually refers to the spontaneous coordination of these myriad of daily decisions via supply and demand and the sum total at the end of the day gives a balance sheet of what consumers favor or disfavor.
This is hardly “simplistic” unless is used to thinking that way to begin with.
The audacity of the government thinking it can replace those decisions is truly SIMPLISTIC to the extreme.
Robert Taylor/Horseshoe Bay, TX
The reference to laissez-faire capitalism being “simplistic” is, itself, a simplistic analysis. Individual Americans and corporations literally make millions of economic decisions daily. It’s simplistic to the infinite degree to assume government regulations could even begin to process this information unless you had a total/infinite dictatorship.
Adam Smith’s famous description of “an invisible hand” (mostly to placate the religious establishment in his time and place)actually refers to the spontaneous coordination of these myriad of daily decisions via supply and demand and the sum total at the end of the day gives a balance sheet of what consumers favor or disfavor.
This is hardly “simplistic” unless one is used to thinking that way to begin with.
The audacity of the government thinking it can replace those decisions is truly SIMPLISTIC to the extreme.
Robert Taylor/Horseshoe Bay, TX
Those few who are left who acknowledge they are Republicans cannot honor even a dead Democrat. That is a huge difference between Rs and Ds.
Hey Marvin what’s your address down there in SOCAL?
GBS BULLSHITTIUM Alert StarTrek Klaxon Horn Soungs
So I suppose you were in the service then and forgot about Thomas TIPping Very Left O’Neill and Jim Fort Worthless Wright running the House and spending all that money through lies. Hmmm… GBS, I’m shocked and amazed at your lack of clarity in the US Constitution.
End of GBS BULLSHITTIUM Alert StarTrek Klaxon Horn Ends
11121 N. Sepulveda Blvd
Mission Hills, CA 91345
Let me warn you, you send me mail I will fly up there and kick your ass!!!
Gee. You mean Republicons like Kemp didn’t call people like me names because we don’t like being wiretapped, spied on, or had our homes and emails searched without warrants or oversight? You mean there is some other kind of Republicon? Amazing!
Why is it that the word Republican makes me want to vomit?
25 – Oh funny! That’s the cop station.
goldstein said,kemp had , “policies you can hate, character you can trust, rare among republicans”….are u FUCKING KIDDING ME???? character…how about
bill clinton
william jefferson ,90,000 cash in his freezer
blagoyvich
rangel, tax cheat
sebelius, tax cheat
elliot spitzer
ted kennedy, at least one woman dead, no conviction
it could go onforever
goldstein, one thing iagree with you, take away our guns, cause if the revolution starts, we’ll follow the lead of barrington vt, that wants to have bush and cheney arrested, except it will be you that will be arrested, and all your fucking bolshivec cousins