[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]Every time the American people look at Mitt Romney, they should get angry. He is the walking personification of the biggest scam ever perpetrated on America, “trickle down” economics.
Romney is the embodiment of trickle-down returning to rub our stupidity in our face, right down to his cynical pauses and sideways half-smile that seems to say, “Let’s see if you’re dumb enough to swallow this again.”
He is such a cynical, insincere, obvious con man. If he didn’t exist, Saturday Night Live would have created him. He’s as stiff and emotion free as Max Headroom, and just as contrived: “Yes, my good friends, and what I love most about your fair city is the height of the trees.” What?
Trickle down, or supply- side economics, which came to be known as “Reaganomics,” was a scheme hatched by USC economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd. It was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget.
The Intended Goal
The theory behind Reaganomics, ostensibly, was, if you cut taxes for business and for people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs.
That way the money would trickle down to the rest of us. According to the scheme, the resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president-to-be, called it “voodoo economics.”
Reaganomics sought to undo safeguards put in place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to what prevailed during the Coolidge administration.
What happened, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than intended. Instead of taking the money and investing it into new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One scheme, the leveraged buyout, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost millions of jobs, and the country’s industrial base.
The bottom fell out of the stock market on Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points, the greatest one-day decline since 1914, 15 years before the Great Depression.
Even though this scheme has brought economic disaster to the American people several times in the past 30 years, the Republican party continues to repackage it and trot it back out every eight years. They tend to wait until after the Democrats have rescued the nation, and their previous disaster has retreated from the collective memory of the electorate.
His Problematic Record
Clear evidence of that is in spite of President Reagan's grandiose promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit, by the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender in history, he added more to the deficit than all other Presidents.
Reagan tripled the national debt. It went from $712 billion in 1980 to $2,052 billion in 1988. What was the Republican Party’s plan to deal with that disaster? In its Contract with America, (Republicans are good with slogans), Newt Gingrich’s Republican-run Congress proposed a capitol gains tax cut for the rich.
It took Democrat Bill Clinton to rescue the nation. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, said the following regarding Clinton’s Presidency:
“The Clinton years were unquestionably a time of progress, especially on the economy […] Clinton's 1992 slogan, 'Putting people first,' and his stress on 'the economy, stupid,' pitched an optimistic if still gritty populism at a middle class that had suffered under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. […] By the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans and the aged.”
On Sept. 27, 2000, CNN reported:
President Clinton announced that the federal budget surplus for fiscal year 2000 amounted to at least $230 billion, making it the largest in U.S. history and topping last year's record surplus of $122.7 billion. This represents the largest one-year debt reduction in the history of the United States.”
Then came George W. Bush, with his huge tax cuts for the rich, reinstituting the Republican philosophy of trickle-down economics and reckless deregulation. That led to the 2008 economic crash, bringing the nation within a hair’s breadth of a second Great Depression, causing the conditions under which we are currently suffering.
Who Pays Attention?
The people continue to be stiffed by the Republican party because the average American fails to understand that we don’t have just one economy. We have two, one that governs the prosperity of the investor class, another that governs the prosperity of working class. The two are in competition for their part of the same economic pie.
The problem is, for the investor class to prosper, they must squeeze every penny and concession from the working class. When Wall Street is celebrating a robust economy, they are producing more product with fewer jobs, fewer work hours, and lower pay for the workers. That is how they profit.
When the United States had a strong internal industrial base, the investor class and working class complemented one another. The corporate community provided the working class with, essentially, lifetime jobs. The working class could afford to purchase the goods and services that the corporations produced. They had a symbiotic relationship. One insured the prosperity of the other.
In the new global economy, where American corporations have become international conglomerates that have to compete with countries paying their workers less per week than most Americans spend on lunch per day, the American worker has become a liability. The corporate community has a vested interest in lowering the standard of living of the middle class.
The need to make greater profits accounts for the aggressive assault on our educational system. They need more worker bees and fewer thinkers – or troublemakers. It has brought an assault on collective bargaining, and all manner of corporate regulations and employee rights. They are on a mission to convert America from a democratic republic to a corporate sweatshop.
Enter Mitt Romney. If we elect Romney, we’ll not just be electing a Republican politician who highly sympathetic to the investor class, but the poster child of the investor class. It would be like entrusting our child to one of the most infamous child molesters in the country.
The New York Post reported in the Josh Kosman article, Romney’s Past Is More a Working Class Zero, “Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts.” Of course, the businesses couldn’t manage that. Workers were laid off and the businesses entered bankruptcy.
The article goes on to list some of the businesses that Mitt Romney squeezed the profits from, then sent into bankruptcy:
• Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
• Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
• Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
• Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.”
Say what you will about President Obama, but it seems to me that the credentials of Romney and his Republican cohorts as job creators make the President look like Santa Claus. If you agree, tell a hungry Republican. He might be black, but that is a pork chop in his hand.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
