Ray Charles pretty much nailed the US economy after eight years of Reagan: “Them that’s got is them that gets, and I ain’t got nothing yet.” I’ve been thinking about Reagan a lot lately, since the Reagan years and the huge tax cuts for the rich were the third epoch of accelerated income inequality. We are now, of course, in the fourth, scrambling for our Life Alert: “We’ve fallen and we can’t get up!”
You would think the Great Recession would have caused some serious reflection by serious people. We were, after all, on the brink of economic collapse. But serious, patriotic, idealistic people are hard to come by, particularly on the right, where “Waiting for Godot” has morphed into “Waiting for Gohmert.” I feel I’m stuck in the middle of a novel I read years ago, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where life for the middle class is on an endless cycle of “Rinse and Repeat” and you can do nothing to stop it or even slow it down.
Anyway, the point I was going to make about Reagan was that when it came to destroying perhaps the last great hope for the middle class, at least we took the arsenic in small doses. And at first, even though we were looking at the seeds of our own destruction, we were mesmerized and awestruck, watching “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and perhaps the entertainment epicenter of Gilded Age II, “The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” By the end of the 80s, conspicuous consumption had become so conspicuous, that even billionaire David Rockefeller said, after learning Michael Milken earned $550M in salary in 1987, “such an extraordinary income inevitably raises questions as to whether there isn’t something unbalanced in the way our financial system is working.” You think? At the same time Rockefeller said this, Saul Steinberg and Malcolm Forbes were throwing multimillion-dollar birthday parties. It was even reported that Forbes’ party even came with a cavalcade of Moroccan cavalry—at a time when most of us were doing well to swing Chucky Cheese.
So it started with tax cuts for the richest Americans. Reagan, I have no doubt, truly believed trickle-down was sound economic theory—that you give the richest 1% untold riches and rig the game to make their wealth expand exponentially and they will shower largesse on the middle class—unless, of course, you’re “lazy,” a minority, from a hardscrabble neighborhood, disabled, etc.
But we know better now. So why do we let the Republicans hoist Reagan’s ghost with MORE tax cuts for the richest 1% yet again? We were fooled in the 1980s, but now? I’ll leave it to Nobel Prize winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz to remind you of what we already know, that this will deepen the divide and make it harder and harder to fight our way to equilibrium, to azure skies and calm seas. Forgive me. I’m getting poetic and I meant to stay, for once, on the subject I began with, economics. I need to close anyway—the waiter at Chucky Cheese just brought the pizzas and the kids are driving me crazy.