The Good Guys
I confess. It's often easy to talk as if conservatives don't know what they're doing. You see Rand Paul stepping over bodies to rail about cigarette taxes, Louis Gohmert mumbling about secret gay conspiracies, and Michele Bachmann ... you see Michele Bachmann, and it's easy to think of the GOP as a collection of clueless wackjobs who hold office by appealing to the absolute worst instincts of a gullible electorate.
Nope. Wrong.
For years now—decades—conservatives have been giving us the flat-out truth: that lower taxes bring greater wealth, decreased regulation leads to greater innovation, government is incompetent, unions hold companies back and that voter fraud is shaping our elections.
Es verdad, amigo, and you know it. Come on in. Let's talk below the fold.
Lower taxes bring greater wealth
Absolutely indisputable. In 1980, at the start of Our Savior's Reign, the top tax rate in America was a disgusting 70 percent. That would be chopped to 50 percent by 1986, and down to 35 percent today. Between 1980 and 2008, the income of the top one percent grew by 275 percent. That's an annual growth rate of just under 10 percent. Think about that, sports fans, double-digit income growth, year in and year out, for three decades. And it's not like it's stopping. Despite all that recession stuff, the top one percent got another 13 percent raise in 2009. And 2010. And 14 percent in 2011. In 2012, incomes of the wealthiest one percent jumped 20 perdcent. Things are only getting better.
This issue is done. Settled. Don't ever again think about raising income taxes one penny. In fact, think about what it would do it you cut the top rate to less than 20 percent using one of those "flat rate" plans that conservatives are offering us as a gift. That would surely shoot wealth to the moon! Oh, and feel free to impose all the "usage fees" on parks and such, or "value-added taxes" on consumers. Those are hilarious.
Oh yeah, it should probably be mentioned that the income of 80 percent of Americans over the same period edged lower. Then declined. Then went down. Then dropped a bit. Then sagged a little. Then fell.
But most of those people weren't wealthy in the first place. So it doesn't matter.
Decreased regulation leads to greater innovation
Another basic truth. Just look at one example. In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Blilely Act. Now I know that Congress getting anything done at all, other than naming something after Reagan, is usually a bad thing, but not this time. That's because this act actually ripped out stale, mean old regulations that had been stifling the banking industry since 1933. It knocked down walls, man. Walls.
Thanks to this one act, we didn't just have banks anymore. We had "financial supermarkets" that rolled together regular commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance firms under colorful capes of fiscal righteousness. Freed from the shackles of institutional segregation, these super banks got super, super creative. They got so super creative with options, forwards, futures, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and a bunch of relatives, that before you knew it they made more money than there was money. By 2007, there were $62.2 trillion worth of Credit Default Swaps alone. How much is that? Only five times the whole US GDP. In fact, it's more than the global GDP.
How amazing is this: Given just eight years, super banks got so creative that they "created" more money than there was on the whole planet. That's like discovering a whole new world. Imaginary money world.
Face it. You're not that creative. Probably because you're too regulated.
Government is incompetent
Boy howdy. Do we even have to discuss this? I mean, we have a Congress that's the least productive in history. We have people voting over and over and over again on the same law even though they know it's not going to pass. We have Congress trying to sue the president. We have government shutdowns caused by people who think that playing economic brinkmanship is so fun that they put a huge dent in the economics. We have a Supreme Court that thinks racism is over and that money doesn't have a big enough role in elections. And we have a bureaucracy that can't work because the most important roles have been starved of both funding and support in favor of programs that actively impede the functions of the agencies in which they are lodged. Damn straight government is incompetent. By design.
Bonus points: the same people who assigned Congress a single digit approval rating just voted for even more of what they said they didn't like last time. Which pretty well proves that our version of democracy is also incompetent.
Unions hold companies back
On this one, we might have to dust off a book or two because unions ... who has one of those anyway? Believe it or not, once upon a time unions were important. In 1950, a third of all workers were in unions. Which was very, very bad. Because of those unions, workers were able to negotiate with companies from a position of strength. They got decent wages, good pensions, retirement at a reasonable age, along with pointless benefits like decent working hours, job safety, and even health care. There were still about a quarter of American workers causing problems like this in 1980. Then things got better. In just five years, nearly a third of union workers lost their union protection. And it kept on falling. Now union membership is down to about seven percent.
Thanks to the fall in union membership, companies were able to hold down wages, offshore jobs, destroy the pension system in favor of 401Ks, greatly cut back on benefits, and put the money where it belonged—in the pockets of CEOs, major stockholders, and corporate bank vaults. In 1950, union-plagued GM was barely able to rake in ten percent profit on its way to being the largest, most successful company in the nation while being forced to shell out to its workers a wage equivalent to almost $50 an hour along with all those benefits. In 2013, blissfully de-unionated Walmart is able to pay less than $9 an hour, and to make sure that workers get so few hours that they don't qualify for any of those benefits at all. That lets them send almost all their money to a handful of people who happened to be related to the guy who started the company. As God intended.
Special bonus goodness: As America has learned to properly hate unions, even those companies where unions have been such pests have gotten better. Thanks to the decline in union power, a new autoworker at GM now makes just under what a starting janitor made at the company in 1980.
Voter fraud is shaping our elections
Absolutely, because everyone knows that it's dead people in Chicago voting for inner city Democrats that causes elections in North Carolina and Missouri to ... do something. Somehow. Anyway, twelve states have now passed laws saying that people wealthy enough to own a car are immediate members of the voting club, but otherwise you have to take a poll test extra steps to get in the door on election day. Which will totally protect Texas and Tennessee against Chicago zombies and against minority voter registration drives. Which are probably organized by ISIS. In addition to Voter ID laws, we've also made significant strides in cutting back on voting hours, dropping the number of polling places, making it easier to challenge voters, making sure that people who are either working or going to school on election day are kept away from polls, and just in general making sure the wrong people never cast a ballot.
All of which is just the warm-up act to make things better for the people. Because corporations are people, my friend, and these people now have unlimited dollars that they can spend in absolutely secrecy. If that money gets spent telling you that a guy with three purple hearts is actually an America-hating coward, or that some other guy is in league with Muslim extremists to take away your guns, or that there's this woman who was too busy doing, I don't know, women stuff, to get up and save Americans when she had the chance. What are you going to do about it? Nothing, that's what, because you're not one of the people. You're just that other thing. A human being.
Yep, our elections are definitely shaping up.
Face it. Conservatives have this stuff down. And if you think reasonable regulation and moderate tax rates along with greater worker representation might restore decent middle-class incomes while reigning in the massive aggregation of wealth by a tiny elite standing on top of the wealthiest entities in human history ... well, just stop that. It's way too complicated. Aren't you Taxed Enough Already? Don't you believe the Government Is the Problem? That's good.
Now go back to bed.