IrvineRenter_IHB
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The last time I saw an election like this one was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won. I grew up in a household of core Democrats. To this day, my parents have never voted for a Republican. On election night, and for days after in 1980, my parents, like Democrats everywhere, were convinced Ronald Reagan was going to trash the economy. He was supposedly going to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget. They were afraid his attempts to do this were going to create a runnaway budget deficit resulting in financial Armageddon. They witnessed the Republicans take control of the Senate and nearly take control of the House in a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan.
Now the winds of change are blowing.
I spent today listening to core Republicans at work telling me how worried they were that Barack Obama is going to create an economic and social cataclysm from which the United States will never recover. He is going to raise everyone's taxes, his economic policies are going to make this recession a depression, they will take away all our guns, and his social policies will result in abortion clinics on every corner, gay prostitutes teaching Sunday School, and the the expansion of the culture of dependency due to the socialist entitlement programs he and the Democrats will pass. In short, it is the end of the world as we know it.
The Democrats were wrong in 1980, and the Republicans are wrong today.
The American populace is fickle when it comes to its political leaders. If peoples lives improve, they will vote incumbents back into office; if their lives do not improve, they will vote them out. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1984, he asked a simple question, "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago." The answer was a resounding "yes." When people asked themselves if they were better off 8 years ago before Bush and the Republicans took control, they answered yesterday with a resounding "no," and threw the Republicans out of office. Whether or not the Republicans really are responsible for today's problems is not relevant -- the electorate believes they are, and that is why the Republicans were defeated on election day.
When Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980, the middle class had a firm grip on power in Washington. The labor unions were very strong, and their demands for ever-increasing salaries contributed to the problem of inflation which was acute at the time. Taxes on the "rich" (actually high wage earners) were very high. It was difficult to pool capital to expand business, and it was very expensive to do so. At that point in history, Reagan's policies of cutting taxes on high wage earners and diminishing the influence of labor unions helped quell inflation pressures, pool capital, and provide incentives for small businesses to create new jobs. It was a tremendous boost to the economy. It set the stage for 28 years of dominance of Conservative Republican ideas.
That is over now.
When taken to its extreme, the tax policy that favors the rich over the middle class begins to have serious problems. (If you want to see the extreme of this, look at Saudi Arabia). It is the middle class that earns money to buy products to make the companies of the rich successful. If the middle class is being squeezed to provide resources for the rich, there comes a point where the middle class cannot support our consumer economy. That is why the Bush tax cuts did not have the same impact as the Reagan tax cuts did. It was only masked by the rampant borrowing of the bubble years, particularly from 2002-2006. If not for the massive fiscal stimulus of borrowed money, our economy would not have recovered from the recession of 2001. All the Bush tax cuts accomplished was it helped make the rich much richer. Very little of that "trickled down" to the middle class in the way of wage growth, and our economy is suffered as a result. It is still suffering, and now that the bills are coming due, we are going to have a major recession.
We are about to see the pendulum swing back the other direction, perhaps for a long time given how large the majorities are in the House and Senate for the Democrats. Of course, if the Republicans are right, and if the policies of Barack Obama and the Democrats are a complete disaster, the electorate will throw them out of office as well. It was just 4 short years ago that the Republicans had the White house, a 30 seat majority in the House, and 56 Senators. It is amazing how quickly things can change when the political winds start to blow.
The last time I saw an election like this one was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won. I grew up in a household of core Democrats. To this day, my parents have never voted for a Republican. On election night, and for days after in 1980, my parents, like Democrats everywhere, were convinced Ronald Reagan was going to trash the economy. He was supposedly going to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget. They were afraid his attempts to do this were going to create a runnaway budget deficit resulting in financial Armageddon. They witnessed the Republicans take control of the Senate and nearly take control of the House in a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan.
Now the winds of change are blowing.
I spent today listening to core Republicans at work telling me how worried they were that Barack Obama is going to create an economic and social cataclysm from which the United States will never recover. He is going to raise everyone's taxes, his economic policies are going to make this recession a depression, they will take away all our guns, and his social policies will result in abortion clinics on every corner, gay prostitutes teaching Sunday School, and the the expansion of the culture of dependency due to the socialist entitlement programs he and the Democrats will pass. In short, it is the end of the world as we know it.
The Democrats were wrong in 1980, and the Republicans are wrong today.
The American populace is fickle when it comes to its political leaders. If peoples lives improve, they will vote incumbents back into office; if their lives do not improve, they will vote them out. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1984, he asked a simple question, "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago." The answer was a resounding "yes." When people asked themselves if they were better off 8 years ago before Bush and the Republicans took control, they answered yesterday with a resounding "no," and threw the Republicans out of office. Whether or not the Republicans really are responsible for today's problems is not relevant -- the electorate believes they are, and that is why the Republicans were defeated on election day.
When Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980, the middle class had a firm grip on power in Washington. The labor unions were very strong, and their demands for ever-increasing salaries contributed to the problem of inflation which was acute at the time. Taxes on the "rich" (actually high wage earners) were very high. It was difficult to pool capital to expand business, and it was very expensive to do so. At that point in history, Reagan's policies of cutting taxes on high wage earners and diminishing the influence of labor unions helped quell inflation pressures, pool capital, and provide incentives for small businesses to create new jobs. It was a tremendous boost to the economy. It set the stage for 28 years of dominance of Conservative Republican ideas.
That is over now.
When taken to its extreme, the tax policy that favors the rich over the middle class begins to have serious problems. (If you want to see the extreme of this, look at Saudi Arabia). It is the middle class that earns money to buy products to make the companies of the rich successful. If the middle class is being squeezed to provide resources for the rich, there comes a point where the middle class cannot support our consumer economy. That is why the Bush tax cuts did not have the same impact as the Reagan tax cuts did. It was only masked by the rampant borrowing of the bubble years, particularly from 2002-2006. If not for the massive fiscal stimulus of borrowed money, our economy would not have recovered from the recession of 2001. All the Bush tax cuts accomplished was it helped make the rich much richer. Very little of that "trickled down" to the middle class in the way of wage growth, and our economy is suffered as a result. It is still suffering, and now that the bills are coming due, we are going to have a major recession.
We are about to see the pendulum swing back the other direction, perhaps for a long time given how large the majorities are in the House and Senate for the Democrats. Of course, if the Republicans are right, and if the policies of Barack Obama and the Democrats are a complete disaster, the electorate will throw them out of office as well. It was just 4 short years ago that the Republicans had the White house, a 30 seat majority in the House, and 56 Senators. It is amazing how quickly things can change when the political winds start to blow.
