Worst Earnings Drop In Modern History

6 Comments so far ↓

• sinz54 // Apr 19, 2009 at 10:22 am

  David, are you sure that the tea parties were made up solely of loyal GOP base activists? That’s not what I saw.At numerous tea parties, when various GOP politicians tried to address the crowds, they were jeered or even booed.It didn’t have the look and feel of a GOP comeback. Rather, it was reminiscent of how Ross Perot’s Reform Party got started in 1992.

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• Churl // Apr 19, 2009 at 11:04 am

  Good old Frum with another of his “Not our kind of people, Binky” moments. “Raaathah less than the paid subscription to the Wine Spectatah”. A strange metric by which a conservative would judge a nascent political movement interested in the conservative ideas of limited government and controllable taxation. Activism alone won’t guarantee a return to a conservative majority, but activists are necessary to effect any major political change and it would make sense to tap their enthusiasm rather than write them off with an elitist smirk. David Frum: conservative strategist and God’s gift to the lefties.

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• ottovbvs // Apr 19, 2009 at 12:34 pm

  The so called tea parties were really grievance parties attended by the usual mixture of anti abortion, gun rights, christian fundamentalism, small govt, anti tax, birth certificate, crowd. Judging by their appearance I’d say very few were earning more than $200k a year and most of them are going to receive tax cuts from the stimulus and budget so what’s their beef. Taxes. Did they know as Dick Armey admitted on TV the other morning that the 2009 tax take at around 15.5% of GDP is the lowest since 1950! Probably not but then that’s not really the point, they were there to air grievances real or imagined. I don’t think Churl is into ironic humor. David is pointing out that far from being a “nascent political movement” the tea parties were a fairly small number of people heavily larded with goofballs who probably did conservatism more harm than good in the eyes of most Americans. Think of the more crazy anti war protesters, did the help or harm the Dems?

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• sinz54 // Apr 19, 2009 at 3:44 pm

  ottovbvs: Have you bread their posts on any of the blogs like Redstate.com? From what they said, I believe their “beef” is twofold:1. In order to pay for a $2.7 trillion yearly budget (not counting the spike in entitlement spending as the baby-boomers retire), either taxes are going to have to go way up in future years, or else there will be tremendous inflationary pressure as the economy recovers. It’s a lot easier to expand spending on social programs than to cut it.2. These folks don’t want to live in a European-style Social Democracy in which cradle-to-grave social programs exist that are paid by taxes on the private sector. Obama is using the current economic crisis as an excuse to wreck the Reagan Revolution and reinvent economic liberalism of the 1960s, which we had left for dead decades ago.I sympathize with both those concerns. They’re not “wild-eyed” at all. Rather, they are looking down the road to beyond this current economic crisis, as to what kind of a government and society we’ll have. Let me put it this way: I don’t want to live in a left-wing country. And neither do they.

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• ottovbvs // Apr 20, 2009 at 5:58 am

  sinz54 3:44 PMI’m afraide I don’t read blogs at Redstate anymore than I do at Kos. Of course taxes are going to have to go up. They can’t stay at 15.5% of GDP when historically they’ve been at 18-21%. My expectation is that they are going to around 20% and will stay there because people are quite happy to pay higher taxes to fund social programs like universal healthcare. Also, there is no correlation between taxes or social programs and inflation. They are totally different issues.The problem for the teabag folks is the majority of Americans are quite happy with cradle to grave social programs. As them to give up Social Security or Medicare and you’ll soon find out. In economic terms for the mass of Americans the Reagan revolution has been something of a bust. I can’t embed the chart but the CBO have some numbers out showing that in the period 1979 to 2006 the real incomes of most Americans went up by about 20% while the top 20% went up by 86% and the top 1% by 265%. Personally being one of the top 5% I did ok but I can understand that most Americans are less satisfied. I doubt whether many of the attendees at these tea parties who are probably in bottom 80% are familiar with these numbers. Not that it would make much difference these folks aren’t motivated by reason but by belief.

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• sinz54 // Apr 20, 2009 at 1:53 pm

  ottovbvs: You’d be surprised. It’s precisely because you don’t read the opinions of the hard-right that you don’t know that many of them have advocated abolishing Social Security in its present form, and replacing it with a kind of national 401(k) plan.As for the distribution of real income, it ignores such things as home ownership, which generated giant capital gains (until recently anyway); investment in IRA and 401(k) plans, which also generated giant capital gains, all tax-sheltered; and the increased purchasing power caused by technology. And when I was a kid, a 25 inch analog color TV set cost around $500 in 1970s dollars, which would be the equivalent of around $1500 today. Today you can buy an entire home computer with that amount of money, and accomplish far more than you ever could with a TV set.None of those amazing gains show up in a crude calculation of income only.What scares me about Obama is that, like you, he dismisses all that. He seems content to destroy the prospect of future capital gains in order to pay for a welfare state today. I absolutely HATE that tradeoff, and I believe that when it becomes clear to Americans that’s what we’re getting (which won’t happen till it shows up in their tax returns), most of them are going to hate it too.

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