Perhaps the most startling thing about President Biden’s speech last night is that it inspired Chris Cillizza to say something pretty much true:
In the course of his address Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden said more than 6,000 words. But,11 in particular — all part of a single sentence uttered toward the end of the speech, were the most important.
There are those words: “My fellow Americans, trickle-down, trickle-down economics has never worked.”
With that simple sentence, Biden sought to officially close the book on the dominant economic theory of the last 40ish years: That success by affluent people at the top of the economy would, eventually, trickle down to the average American. It’s been the theory behind every major tax cut pushed by Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan — including Donald Trump’s 2017 cut — and is so closely associated with our 40th president that the economic idea is known colloquially as “Reaganomics.”
And, to be honest, I’m a tad gobsmacked that that’s pretty much true. Joe Biden is, at long last, the president who stood up to Ronald Reagan and said no. No more trickle down, and no more “government is the problem” crap. Joe offered government as the solution, and his solution is to build back the nation not by going through corporations and billionaires but by directly putting working people to work doing it. Barack Obama almost went there but got wobbly. Joe Biden has declared he’s ready to do it.
David Sander writes in the New York Times,
It will take years to know whether Mr. Biden’s initiative will have the lasting power of the New Deal or the Great Society, or whether it can “change the paradigm,” as he argued a few weeks ago.
Yet it is already clear it is based on the gamble that the country is ready to dispense with one of the main tenets of the Reagan revolution, and show that for some tasks the government can jump-start the economy more efficiently than market forces. Mr. Biden has also made a bet that the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic and the social and racial inequities it underscored have changed the political center of gravity for the nation.
I think the political center of gravity could have changed a long time ago if the Democrats had displayed more vision and leadership instead of remaining stuck in Clinton-era “third way” triangulation crap.
Reuters reports that people agree with Joe: trickle down has failed.
A majority of Americans support measures favored by President Joe Biden to substantially redistribute U.S. wealth, according to an Ipsos poll for Reuters released on Thursday, including tax hikes on the wealthy and a higher minimum wage.
The national opinion poll also found that Republican voters were divided over the “trickle-down economics” championed by their party’s leaders since President Ronald Reagan some 40 years ago.
Get that? Republican voters are divided over trickle-down economics. Not-Republican voters have believed it to be a crock for some time.
Even so, last night’s speech was just the opening volley. The war has yet to be waged. Paul Waldman:
… don’t count Reaganomics out. The wealthy who benefit from it, and the Republican Party that still believes in it with every fiber of its being, will never abandon it, no matter how much they might be on their heels right now. It’s an indefatigable zombie, and it’ll be back.
Miz Lindsey has hustled forth to declare Biden’s proposals “socialism,” because that’s what Republicans do these days. But watch out, Miz Lindsey; viewers really liked the speech. CNN says 73 percent said they believe Biden’s proposals would lead the country in the right direction. A CBS poll said 85 percent of viewers approved of the speech.
Of course, people who didn’t watch the speech, which I assume is most Americans, will believe what they are told about it.
I confess I didn’t watch much of the Republican rebuttal. I listened to a little bit of it, and then hit the mute button. I am tired of politicians who do nothing but mouth slogans divorced from reality, and that’s what he was doing. Life is just too damn short.
Going forward, of course, a lot will depend on how much of the agenda is enacted. And that depends a lot on Joe Manchin, unless one Republican senator can be persuaded to support it. There are “secret talks” going on between the White House and Republican senators, Axios reports, I am not optimistic about this.
It's awesome but you can bet the Rs are working overtime to snuff that baby in the crib.
Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that a 78 year-old man – one who, while Senator, was closely tied with banks and credit cards – would be the one to finally slay the Jipper and his "Piss-down On the Non-rich Economics.". Yeah, I know: Raygun (sic) was known as the "Gipper" – after the character he played in a movie about Knute Rockne. Raygun played George Gipp, a dying young football player.
I always imagined it would be a young whippersnapper who would be the one to bring about a more liberal/progressive era. "The Biden Era?"
I haven't been this happy since the first two years of POTUS Obama's administration! He saved our economy, and the world's; he saved the auto industry; he signed the Ledbetter Act for equal treatment and pay for women, etc…
I feel the need to give Obama some cover: He was the FIRST Black POTUS. And he didn't want to be the last! And that may be why he didn't go right after the Right more.
GO JOE!!!!!
Yep. Remember the old Vulcan proverb, only Nixon could go to China? Maybe only some old white man could stand up to Reaganism.
Whoops!
I forgot to tell you why I called Raygun the "Jipper." (I wrote a longer comment before this one that explained it, but my tablet "dun et it!" Rassa-frassa, idjit tablet!!!!).
He and his Reich-Wing puppeteers "jipped" the non-rich of their savings and future income with their 'Tinkle-down Economic Policy." I call it, "Tinkle-down" because basically, it pissed on the non-rich. That tRUMPshit* policy moved tax dollars from the bottom 99%, up to the top 1%.
And THAT is why I called Raygun, the "Jipper!" 🙂
*I'm going to use TFG's name in epiphets anywhere I can think of! tRUMP, the "man," IS an epiphet in human form.
We need to go for it – and sometimes fail. I'm talking about 2021 and 2022. If Richardhead Joe shuts down the economic plan, we need to use the anger to win two more Senate seats in 2022.. If Joe (and the GOP) shuts down sane gun restrictions, we need to use the anger to pick up two Senate seats in 2022. If the GOP shuts down immigration reform, we need to use that anger to pick up two more Senate seats in 2022. Two more seats won't give us a supermajority, but it's enough to kill the filibuster.
The Supremes are going to go on a rampage. I hope they do. That gives Democrats a reason to pack the court in 2022.
What we should NOT do is back away from putting good, popular legislation up for a vote, even if we lose. That vote AGAINST the popular will is the fuel to get to the power.
Economics is the dismal science so they say. I have never known who first turned that phrase and in what context, so I did a little research. It seems the Scottish writer/philosopher Thomas Carlyle gets the credit. The context in which his writing first included that phrase was in reference to slavery in the West Indies. An alternative context may have been Thomas Malthus's "dismal" predictions on population growth vs. food supply, though no writing gives evidence to that connection. Today writers tend to use the phase with reference to economic failures, of which supply side or more commonly trickle down Economics earns the "dismal" rating. Having lived through Sam Brownback's Economic experiment on Kansas, by way of Reaganomics I and many other Kansans can attest to just how dismal things can get. Get the stake through the heart of that zombie supply side idea quickly, lest it come back again.
Derek Thompson made the case that Economics, from the roots of Thomas Carlyle's usage, has merits as a moral force in opposition to slavery and other economic paradigms that sometimes more than trickle down misery on humans. You go Joe, out with the elevation of this dismal failure of an economic idea. True wealth is the product of labor and capital. A moral economics gives proper credit to the labor component and it's skills and techniques. As Biden properly said, Wall Street did not build this country. Capital is only one component of wealth.
Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science' – The Atlantic
Interesting. I had never looked into where that "dismal" quote came from.