"The United States of America is facing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression." "Desperate times call for desperate measures." "America's economic crisis could turn into a catastrophe unless Congress quickly passes (Obama’s) economic stimulus package." These aphoristic pronouncements herald an even more profound reality that the economic system and underlying philosophy, known collectively as "Reagonomics," has been finally exposed and discredited as an abject failure.
The long-held claim that the "market," unregulated and unfettered by Government interference, always knows best and always creates wealth, was a false supposition that has endured mounting evidence to the contrary. Most ludicrous was the notion that wealth created at the top would spontaneously beget wealth at the bottom. Of course, this was an unproven hypothesis given that those at the top, through exercise of political influence, only allowed the promise of prosperity to "trickle down" and not actual prosperity itself. To add isult to injury, there has been a decades-old conspiratorial effort to suppress wages and we have only Democrats to thank for any pushback that has occurred on that front.
Our current circumstance is the logical the aftermath of nearly thirty years of market-based, economic ideology. Unimaginable enrichment took place over this period, and at the same time, fewer and fewer Americans could claim to be simply "comfortable." Driven by insatiable greed, "free-marketeers" have extracted a steady stream of personal dividends while plowing an insufficient amount of their revenues back into industrial infrastructure and innovation that would ensure sustained and fruitful employment in the long term.
Now the chickens have come home to roost. Out of one side of their mouths, the free-market crowd derides taxpayer-provided stimulus measures as Socialist, and abhors the imminent tax increase and restoration of regulatory oversight, and out of the other side of their mouths, they petition for second-helpings of bailout money, while begrudging mortgage assistance to "loser" working people. This is the disgraceful legacy of Reaganomics.
Like some nasty fungal infection, Conservatism and Reaganomics will never really go away. Every year, legions of earnest Young Republicans graduate from our universities determined to fight the "good fight" for what they perceive to be the "American Way." This army of cockeyed zealots will fan out over the countryside with the sole purpose of persuading the American people to vote against their own economic interests, a phenomenon ably examined by Thomas Frank in "What’s The Matter With Kansas." Using time-tested themes of cultural warfare, aided and abetted by media progagandists, their mission is to cast aside the Socialistic tendencies of the "Democrat Party" and restore the notion of the "Shining City On A Hill." But given the painful and traumatic experience that many are likely to endure for the next few years, maybe, just maybe, the people of Kansas and the other forty nine states won’t be so easily seduced in the future.