It’s Time For Democrats To Drive A Stake Through The Heart Of Reaganomics

Donald Trump today awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Republican economist Art Laffer, the ‘godfather’ of supply-side trickle down Reaganomics. Laffer’s contributions have built a streak of unbroken Republican policy wrongness over a time and scale few policy entrepreneurs in history can match. Trump is giving Laffer the award because last year he coauthored a fawning tribute to President Trump and his agenda. Trump is known to habitually reward his most slavish supporters.

Reaganomics is President Ronald Reagan's conservative economic policy that promised to subsantially shrink the federal government and government spending, and reduce the government's influence on the economy.

Reagan’s legislative agenda implemented an era of laissez-faire economic policy that promoted unregulated “free markets” and untaxed “capitalism” where corporate tax rates and capital gains rates for individuals were effectively diminished, as near as possible, to zero.

Dubbed supply-side, or trickle-down, economics, President Reagan’s economic policy was to reduce, and where possible, elminate taxes on businesses and the wealthy in society as a means to stimulate business investment. Reagan’s theory of trickle-down economics held that corporations and the wealthy would directly invest the money they don’t pay to the government in taxes into business development, which creates jobs, and supports social institutions, which benefits society at large. The theory says that as companies get more cash from tax cuts, they will hire new workers and expand their businesses. It also says that income tax cuts to workers give them more incentive to work, increasing the supply of labor.

No Centrist Middle Ground for Democrats

Who said: “Socialism is a scare word (the corporate special-interest lobbies) have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all the people…”? It wasn’t Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Who said: “We are rightly proud of the high standards of medical care we know how to provide in the US. The fact is, however, that most of our people cannot afford to pay for the care they need. I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program. The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles. This great nation cannot afford to allow its citizens to suffer needlessly from the lack of proper medical care”? It wasn’t Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warren Is Not Afraid of Democrats

The 2020 presidential candidate has a long track record of opposing lobbyists, billionaires, the Republicans—and her own party’s centrists. When Senator Elizabeth Warren declared that she was running for president in February, she described Donald Trump’s administration as “the most corrupt in living memory.” But she didn’t stop there: “Even after Trump is gone, it won’t be enough to do a better job of running a broken system,” she said. Warren’s speech was centered around the notion that political corruption is not a uniquely Republican problem. “To protect their economic advantages, the rich and powerful have rigged our political system as well,” she continued. “They’ve bought off or bullied politicians in both parties to make sure Washington is always on their side.”

Anyone who’s followed Warren’s career knows she’s been making statements like this for years. These are all implicit criticisms of the Democratic Party’s centrist policies charted by President Bill Clinton and adopted as party orthadoxy over the last quarter century. But her position is suddenly mainstream.

Read the rest of the story at: The Nation: Elizabeth Warren Is Not Afraid of the Democrats

Green New Deal

In very broad strokes, the Green New Deal resolution offered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. asks members of Congress to recognize the duty of the Federal Government to set goals to slow and stop global warming. In that vein, the resolution stresses that it aims to meet its ambitious goals while paying special attention to groups like the poor, disabled and minority communities that might be disproportionately affected by massive economic transitions like those the Green New Deal calls for.

Importantly, the resolution is nonbinding, meaning that even if it were to pass, it wouldn't itself create any new programs. Instead, it would affirm the sense of Congress that carbon output should be cut in the coming years to slow global warming and the ravages of climate change.

The resolution is simply a statement of intent, explaining the justification and goals of an infrastructure program to transition to a sustainable low carbon output future. This is at once incredibly ambitious and politically practical, in that resolution co-authors seem to have in their minds a long-term plan to get it accomplished.

(Lawmakers pass nonbinding resolutions for things as simple as congratulating Super Bowl winners, as well as to send political messages — for example, telling the president they disapprove of his trade policies, as the Senate did in summer 2018.)

The Green New Deal resolution outlines a framework of big climate-change-related ideas combined with a list of progressive public policy proposals that, taken together, would touch nearly every American and overhaul the economy.