Marco Rubio came out swinging: Hillary represents old ideas. “Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday,” Rubio said. “Yesterday is over -- and we're never going back.” Of course, if you Google “Rubio old ideas,” you’ll find a bunch of articles saying that his proposals are nothing new either. The next two years promise to be a never ending litany of how the other side has nothing new to offer, simply stale old ideas that their party has long endorsed. They are all right.
Republicans have been saying for years that government is the problem, we need to get government out of the way and let free enterprise take off, that we need to lower taxes on the rich so that they will create jobs, and we will all benefit because a rising tide lifts all boats. The new crop of Republicans are saying exactly the same things.
Democrats have been saying for years that free enterprise does not work without constraints, that we need to rein in corporations and force them to treat their workers and the environment fairly, that there is too much wealth accumulated at the top and too little resources devoted to the general public, including infrastructure and help for those who need it. Government is part of the solution, and the way to a robust economy is to increase government spending in certain areas and cover this by increasing taxes, especially on the rich. The new crop of Democrat is saying the same things.
But there is an important difference. It’s called experimental evidence.
Republicans say that lowering taxes will spark the economy and make things better for everyone. Have we ever tried this? Yes, we have. Taxes (especially for the rich) dropped dramatically during the 1980’s when Reagan was president, and then again during the 2000’s under George W. Bush. If you look at graphs of who has money, there is an almost perfect correlation between the lowering of these taxes and the massive accumulation of ever more wealth at the top. In the meantime, the middle class has hardly improved their lot at all (by some measures, they are worse off). The minimum wage (corrected for inflation) is lower than it was in the 70’s. So we know the answer: lowering taxes on the rich serves to make them richer, and little else.
Democrats argue that the way to improve the lot of the 99% is not to give it to someone else, but to spend money in a way that directly benefits them. Things like subsidized health care, higher minimum wage, jobs created by fixing our infrastructure, unemployment benefits for people out of work, etc. Have we ever tried that? Well, actually, no, not recently. We tried, but we never were able to carry out the experiment the way we wanted.
Obama entered office with a financial crisis staring at him. The solution, everyone agreed, was to spend a bunch of government money to get the economy going. Democrats wanted most of it to go to actual spending. Republicans wanted most of it to go to tax cuts. In the end, it was about 50-50. The economy has recovered, according to economists and measures, although there are still many Americans who have not. What would have happened if we had done it the way the Democrats really wanted? We’ll never know, because they wouldn’t let us.
Obama’s signature achievement is clearly Obamacare, and it is clearly a success by all measures other than Republican rhetoric. But Obamacare is a pale imitation of what it might have been if Democrats had been able to design it. It is riddled with concessions to Republicans in a (failed) effort to get their votes. How successful might it have been if Democrats had been able to design it as they wished? We’ll never know.
Indeed, pretty much everything Obama has tried to do has run into filibusters or threats thereof. The Democrats let the Republicans try their experiments when they had the chance; the Republicans have refused to let the Democrats run theirs. The result is, we know the outcome of Republican policies. We do not know the outcome of Democratic policies. If the Republicans want to argue that Democratic policies don’t work, the least they could do is let us try them to find out.
Look at it this way: the Republicans got to drive their car however they wanted (2000-2006), and they ended up driving it into the ditch. Under the circumstances, one might expect them to hand over the driving to the other guys meekly and see if they can do any better. Instead, after the people put the Democrats into the driver’s seat, the Republicans kept yanking on the wheel and pulling on the emergency brake from the passenger seat. Now they want us to believe that the Democrats are lousy drivers.
The bottom line is that we have a pretty good picture of what will happen if we hire a Republican driver (ditch). We do not have a good picture of what a Democratic driver will do, because we have been saddled for eight years with a Democratic driver arm-wrestling with his passenger. Of course he had trouble steering!
So rather than hand the keys back to the Republicans, it makes more sense to throw them out of the passenger seat and send them to the back seat, where they can talk as much as they want but not actually jerk the car around. The way to do that is to elect more Democrats and fewer Republicans.
Will the Democrats drive the car any better than the Republicans did? I don’t know, but the point is, neither do you. Before we hand the keys back to the Republicans, don’t you think we ought to find out?