Let's talk about common sense. Conservatives say that with welfare, (and/or no death penalty for being unemployed) there's no incentive to work. I say, with the pathetic wages and high taxes for the working class, would *YOU* be eager to work - for an insulting wage that gets taxed to fund aircraft carriers? On the other hand, think of the rich who own corporations - with their huge paychecks and tiny taxes, how can you expect them to be interested in keeping their businesses efficient? What they need is taxes, to give them incentive to do streamlining, bigger growth for more profits to make up for those taxed etc. (Not my rhetoric)
Of course, conservatives (Rush is a great example) advocate the exact opposite of this - while publically worshiping Reagan, who they claim raised taxes for the rich, and lowered them for the poor!
Now wait a minute, if Reagan did the opposite of what you advocate, why do you worship him? The truth is, he did just what Rush liked tax breaks for the rich, tax raises for the poor, and billion-dollar renovations on obsolete battleships, though Rush and other lie repeatedly, - see Al Franken's book.
That's the trickle down theory - any money that manages to trickle down gets taxed.
The highest growth rates this century was during world war 2. Not only did the USA produce half of the world's armaments, it also had masses of food etc. to give to allies. Technology was moving faster than ever, the economy was absolutely nuts...
I'll assume that conservatives agree with me so far. But why was the economy doing so well, so efficiently? Massive government spending - massive taxation of profits (anti-profiteering) government tampering all over the place - war bonds for example, were meant to check inflation. They did.
Conservatives might say that this sort of thing works in the short run, but won't last (of course, in capitalism nothing good lasts, but they don't explain it that way) yet after the war, growth kept going, with enough wealth to spare on fixing up our devastated enemies (though shamefully, we didn't help our devastated allies - so not all is bad for conservatism). In the fifties the economy grew at 4 percent annually, with the rich being taxed - the top marginal rate was 88%.By the Reagan years, with the "unprecedented growth and prosperity" (Rush - and I have no idea what the growth rate was during ww2) of 2.5% annually, the top marginal rate was 28%. Whether the US produced half of the worlds goods during the Reagan years is unlikely.
Nasty big government?
(Standard disclaimer that I'm not a liberal etc.)
From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti:
"In the chemical industry alone, regulations put out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)--at a yearly cost to industry of $140 per worker--brought a 23 percent drop in accidents and sickness, averting some 90,000 illnesses and injuries.
OSHA's resources are pathetically inadequate. It has only enough inspectors to visit each workplace once every eighty years. Workplace standards to control the tens of thousands of toxic substances are issued at the rate of less than three a year. Even this feeble effort has been more than business could tolerate. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, OSHA began removing protections, exempting most firms from routine safety inspections, and weakening the cotton dust, cancer, and lead safety standards, and a worker's right to see company medical records. [This is a problem with reformism: what can be reformed can be deformed.]
The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program (WIC) did cut down on starvation and hunger. On the other hand, years after passing a law making some thirteen million children eligible for medical examination and treatment, Congress discovered that almost 85 percent of the children had been left unexamined [!] ...
The way health care is organized in the United States, money often makes the difference between life and death. Many sick people die simply because they receive insufficient care or are treated too late. Health insurance premiums have risen astronomically and hospital bills have grown five times faster than the overall cost of living. Yet it is almost universally agreed that people are not receiving better care, only more expensive care, and in some areas the quality of care has deteriorated.
Some physicians have cheated Medicaid and Medicare of hundreds of millions of dollars by consistently overcharging for services and tests; fraudulently billing for nonexistent patients or for services not rendered; charging for unneeded treatments, tests, and hospital admissions--and most unforgivable of all-performing unnecessary surgery. Meanwhile, private health insurance companies make profits by raising premiums and withholding care. So people are paying more than ever for health insurance while getting less than ever...
In 1995-96, a Republican-controlled Congress pushed for further cuts in environmental and consumer safety standards [pathetical underfunded as they already are!] and in the regulation of industry, cuts in various public health programs, and cuts in nutritional programs for children and pregnant women. State and local governments are also cutting back on public protection programs and human services in order to pay the enormous sums owed to the banks and to compensate for reductions in federal aid. Thus New York City took such "economy measures" as closing all of its venereal disease clinics and most of its drug rehabilitation and health centers." Copyright _ 1996 Vida Communications and Michael Parenti. All Rights Reserved.
Corporate welfare and the military are never considered to be worth cutting, of course!
Are safety regulations overcautious?
Supreme court justice Stephen Breyer claimed, in his 1993 book "breaking the visious circle", that the public's irrational fear is fed by risk acessors. (Notice how conservatives always consider the public to be irrational?) He said [notice the horror story tactic so popular among conservatives] that a company had to spend 9$ million to clean up a dump site in a swamp, so that children could spoon dirt into their mouths year round. In fact, this area was undeveloped land scedualed for residential devolpment, and the EPA knew that trace amounts of the contaminated dirt would put children at risk. Had his horror story been true, it would not cancel out all of the other lives saved. Remember the conservative yarn, "it's better safe than sorry - unless your corporation is safe and the public is sorry, in which case the shareholders don't have much to complain about, do they?"
It's a market zealot assumption that "big government" means a bad economy, while "lean and mean" means prosperity.
So I dusted off (literally!) my 1992 Grolier's Software Toolworks encyclopedia CD version 1.5 Don't claim it's obsolete, because Ethiopia wasn't in the middle of an economic miracle then anymore than it is now.
Percentage of workers employed in the government:
Not only are the "lean and mean" countries starving, they also tend to be violent and chaotic. Take a look a Rwanda, with a third of America's government - massive genocide. Is this what republican politicians want, or are they just stupid?
More economics of the rich
Is social security collapsing, and should it be privatized?
What do conservatives think of health and welfare?
What's with the Gold standard?
The Austrian school of richonomics
The Chicago school of similar pap
Are they rich because of merit?
Are presidents responsible for the economy?
Government successes and market failures