I follow Ricks' blog The Best Defense and find it interesting.
If you listen to the economic discussion on the above Zakaria show, you will get a pretty good overview of the situation. Here is the panel:
- Robert Skidelsky
- Peter J. Wallison of the AEI
- Zachary Karabell, an author and economist
- John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist magazine
The most sensible person on the panel is Skidelsky, a Keynesian. Micklethwait is intelligent and reasonable. Wallison is a right winger who misleads with his criticisms. He is pushing "inflation scare" which is exactly the wrong thing. This was the big mistake of 1937 under FDR that created a second collapse in the midst of the Great Depression. Karabell didn't get much chance to participate but he appears to be reasonable in his views. What bugs me is that the right wing ideologues still get a lot of "face time" on the media despite the fact that they marched the US (and the world) right into the worst collapse since the Great Depression. These right wing nuts should be discredited and bannished.
5 comments:
Its amazing that they get face time, and they are still pushing reaganomics. A lot of people follow this line still even in the face of utter failure.
Wallison claimed that Reagan did not spend only cut taxes, but this is an outright lie. This guy should be smart enough to know better.
I enjoyed the discussion, though.
Yep... Reagan did what Bush 43 did.
(1) He cut taxes and claimed that would create loads of jobs. But if you look at 2001 thru 2008, not many jobs were created, worse real wages were stuck despite productivity soaring which mean companies made good profits from 2003-2007 (that was why in 2008 commentators said that companies were in "good shape" to weather a recession).
(2) He spent a lot of money on the military. For Reagan that was the boondoggle of Star Wars and for Bush 43 it was the unnecessary war in Iraq.
So both Bush 43 and Reagan left their terms with a crippled government burdened by big expenses and a reduced tax base. But this was the radical conservative agenda of "starve the beast" which they figured would keep Democrats who managed to get in power from starting any programs to help people. It did. But things are so bad Obama is having to put together a $1.4 trillion budget. This is a whopping big deficit and, sadly, most is going to Wall Street and not to help real people.
The tragedy is that most people don't stay on top of facts, so when a suave guy like Wallison says something that seems credible, they just accept it. The rich are in a minority, but they have the time and wealth to wrangle politics to suit their agenda. The framers of the Constitution were afraid of the poor. They worried about mobs and irrational impulses. But the reality is that the poor are too busy working to have time to think politics, so they end up easily tricked by propaganda, or simple misrepresentations like Wallison. Such is the tragedy of life.
Yes, very tragic. I know in my own circumstances that I don't have enough time to completely stay up with things. I know enough to get myself in trouble and thats about it. Sure wish I had a journal from the Reagan years though. I just don't remember events well enough to write about the vague memories.
Thomas: It sounds like you want to read a history book of recent American history that will help you put Reagan into perspective. I think I have the answer. I have not read the book, but it looks like something I would enjoy because it tries to thread the needle between extreme right and left.
It is the book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 by Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princton.
There is a review of the book in the New York Review of Books that says he does a good job of not being partisan:
Strange to think that Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, would embrace Ronald Reagan as the historic alpha dog of postmodern American politics. For starters, Wilentz was trained as a Jacksonian-era scholar; the 20th and 21st centuries aren’t his bailiwicks. Then, back in 1998, Wilentz testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was an abomination. He also endorsed Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008.
...
Undoubtedly, Reaganholics will carp that Wilentz has a selective memory (giving more ink to Iran-contra than Reagan’s diplomacy with Margaret Thatcher), and progressives will denounce him for drinking Gipper-flavored Kool-Aid (equating Reagan with Franklin D. Roosevelt). But, in truth, the main thrust of Wilentz’s thesis is fair-minded, with a slight center-left tilt. It’s hard to dispute his notion that the current Great Society rollback is straight from the Reagan playbook: tax breaks for corporations, a “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, welfare-state slashing, a federal judiciary bent rightward, and even the promotion of “intelligent design” over Darwinism in some schools. But instead of belittling Reagan, Wilentz — who paints a picture of a desultory Democratic Party in the 1970s and ’80s — offers grudging admiration for his political adroitness. “In his political persona, as well as his policies, Reagan embodied a new fusion of deeply conservative politics with some of the rhetoric and even a bit of the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier,” he writes. “This is not to say that Reagan alone caused the long wave of conservative domination — far from it. But in American political history there have been a few leading figures, most of them presidents, who for better or worse have put their political stamp indelibly on their time. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt — and Ronald Reagan.”
Thank you and I will find a copy. It sounds like my kind of book (left of centrist).
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