Reaganomics is Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy

[Octafish]

Despite the toothy grin, the guy really, at heart, was a crook.

The Real Effect of 'Reaganomics'

Ronald Reagan promoted the idea that conservatives prefer to leave the economy to the market. Nonsense – we've been gulled

by Dean Baker
Published on Monday, February 7, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

At the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, his most important legacy has gone largely overlooked. Reagan helped to put a caricature of politics at the centre of the national debate and it remains there to this day. In Reagan's caricature, the central divide between progressives and conservatives is that progressives trust the government to make key decisions on production and distribution, while conservatives trust the market.

This framing of the debate is advantageous for the right, since people, especially in the United States, tend to be suspicious of an overly powerful government. They also like the idea of leaving important decisions to the seemingly natural workings of the market. It is therefore understandable that the right likes to frame its agenda this way. But since the right has no greater commitment to the market than the left, it is incredible that progressives are so foolish as to accept this framing.

In reality, the right uses government all the time to advance its interest by setting rules that redistribute income upward. As long as progressives ignore the rules that are designed to redistribute income upward, they will be left fighting over crumbs. There is no way that government interventions will reverse a rigged market. For some reason, most of the people in the national political debate who consider themselves progressive do not seem to understand this fact.

To take the most obvious example: fighting inflation has come to be seen as the holy grail of central banks – a policy that it is supposed to be outside of the realm of normal political debate. On slightly more careful inspection, the inflation-fighting by the Fed and other central banks is actually a policy that is designed to ensure that the wages of ordinary workers do not grow too rapidly.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/07-10

Robert Parry details how Pruneface institutionalized theft the transfer of wealth to the wealthy through guvmint.

The Dark Legacy of Reaganomics

Exclusive: For half a century – from the depths of the Great Depression until the rise of Ronald Reagan – the U.S. government invested in building the nation and funding key research. And the country flourished. But Reagan then reversed those priorities. The results are in, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com
September 20, 2011

It may be political heresy to say so, but a strong case could be made that the greatest American “job creator” over the past 80 years has been the federal government – or put differently, the government built the framework that private companies then used to create profits and jobs.

This heretical view also would hold that it was Ronald Reagan’s deviation from this formula for success some 30 years ago that put the United States on its current path of economic decline – by starving the government of resources and providing incentives for the rich, through sharply lower taxes, to get super-greedy.

SNIP...

In the future – if the American Right and its Tea Party foot soldiers have their way – the federal government would be reduced to doing little more than paying the Pentagon’s bills and eliminating regulations.

SNIP...

The hard truth for the Republicans and the Right to swallow is that a three-decade experiment with historically low tax rates on the rich has done little more than concentrate America’s wealth at the very top and leave everyone else either stagnating or falling backwards.

CONTINUED...

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/09/20/the-dark-legacy-of-reaganomics/

How any Democrat -- how any thinking being for that matter -- can even entertain supporting such, eh, hooie shows the impacts of a lousy education and the Stockholm Syndrome.

[Jim Warren]

1. background music

https://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html

[Octafish]

2. Thank you for the soundtrack! Great charts, too! Edit...

"To sustain household spending...more women worked..." And for what? To defeat communism? To enrich the already rich? Both ignoble goals.

Thanks, Jim Warren! As someone who appreciates packing a lot of meaning into a small space, you probably know about David McCandless. Those new to the subject might enjoy: Information Is Beautiful.

D'oh! Edit: Need to add the Very Big Guy in all this is Edward Tufte.

[hootinholler]

3. I don't know but I do wonder how involved Mr Nixon was in the rise of Ronnie?

Seems like they ran in the same circles.

[Octafish]

4. Their usefulness to Greed may've been identified early on by Mr. Murray Chotiner...

I know this source has a lot of "I" to his story, but this history has been the subject of much revision, cover-up and revulsion:

The Greg Topper Story

EXCERPT...

After working for near-slave-volunteer wages at this for three years, in 1974, I returned to politics. I was born into it. My mom was recruited by Ike to pick him a V.P. mate for the ticket in 1952. He didn't like Nixon but my mom convinced Ike that if he wanted to win, Nixon would push the ticket over to a win. Mom then went on to follow Bob Finch as Executive Director of Republican Associates in Los Angeles. After that, she went on, at just 34 years old, to build a 400 acre beachfront hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica. What a gal.

I had previously worked a 1962 Republican U.S. Senate campaign for Lloyd Wright..... run by old shenanigan-prone Murray Chotiner; ......Chotiner even worked for President Hoover in 1932. But I gotta tell you as a teenager working with these guys, I learned so much. So much. I was in the thick of it. Out-of-work actors like Ronald "Dutch" Reagan and Fred MacMurray would come in and hang out with Chotiner in the campaign office on Wilshire, then they'd go over and drink and listen to Red Nichols & His Five Pennies at The Zebra Room in the Sheraton Townhouse. Ah, the memories !!

My two-sense:

Murray Chotiner bio at Spartacus.Schoolnet does not mention Reagan, but they obviously ran in the same California mobbed-up circles.

Don Fulsom does a bang-up job on Nixon and the mob: Richard Nixon’s Secret Ties to the Mafia

Dan Moldea does a bang-up job on Reagan and the mob: The Corruption of Ronald Reagan

[Overseas]

5. K&R. Well said.

[Octafish]

6. Thank you, Overseas. I should add how deregulation has sped the Wealth Transference process...

Through the pre-UBS work of then-Sen. Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of War Inc.

Thankfully, someone may have noticed:

One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street

By Robert Scheer
TruthDig.org
Posted on May 18, 2011

The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims ... until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along.

Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.

In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general—a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable—the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.

At the same time, the SEC and other federal regulatory bodies are making sweetheart deals with the bankers to close off accountability for creating and collecting on more than a trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown—a meltdown that has seen the national debt grow by more than 50 percent, stuck us with an unyielding 9 percent unemployment and left 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or clinging desperately to underwater mortgages. On top of which an all-time high of 44 million people are living below the official poverty line and fewer new homes were started in April than at any other time in the past half century. With housing values still in free fall, we continue to make the bankers whole.

As Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times, the Justice Department division responsible for checking for fraud in the bankruptcy system has found a widespread pattern of deception by banks foreclosing homes, and she concluded: “So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_lawman_with_the_guts_to_go_after_wall_street_20110518/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Of course, there was a model.

[girl gone mad]

7. k & r

[Octafish]

8. Ronald Reagan, Budget Cuts, Deficit Spending and the Deconstruction of Social Programs

Red Ink Ronnie cut taxes on his rich chums, increased Pentagon spending, and ballooned the deficit and debt to then-record levels. He also gave his greedhead warmonger bosses the "rationale" they need to cut social spending.

Ronald Reagan, Budget Cuts, Deficit Spending and the Deconstruction of Social Programs

Shouldn't "The Greatest American Ever" Have Been Someone Who Actually Helped People?

by Timothy Sexton
Jan. 26, 2006

EXCERPT...

President Reagan was a firm believer in this methodology and almost from the moment he took his oath of office set to work dismantling government entitlement programs. The first major step toward rolling back opportunities for those not lucky enough to be born into wealth took place when he signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA). OBRA served to cut federal funding programs for the poor as well as inducements for states to provide funding. Unfortunately, cutting funding for programs was not enough to revolutionize the welfare programs in the way that conservative ideologues desired. In order to completely undermine the progressive system of entitlements to the poor, the Reagan administration began to use tax reform as a method of undercutting welfare.

By cutting taxes and instituting such concepts as the Earned Income Credit, Reagan-always the actor-gave the outward appearance of helping poor families. Unfortunately, those measly tax cut gains made barely a dent in the overall loss in benefits the poor were no longer receiving because of cuts and changes to entitlement programs. Throughout the Reagan presidency cuts and rollbacks to welfare programs were systematically enacted even as the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans reached peak proportions. While the wealthy were unquestionably benefiting from their huge tax cuts, the poor were actually losing ground because of them. When Reagan finally left office and his Vice President George Bush ascended to the Presidency in the election of 1988, Bush inherited historic budget deficits of over 3 trillion dollars. Deficits like these left little opportunity to increase spending on social programs even if he had desired to do so. Which, of course, he didn't. After all, there was a war to be waged in Iraq. Remember, I'm talking about George Bush the First. Sometimes, it seems like the country went through a time machine and we're reliving 1989-1992 all over again.


Because the enormous deficit threatened all spending programs, a budget compromise deal was cut in Congress. The compromise contained provisions to increase funding for many social programs that had been assaulted during the Reagan presidency. Despite the best efforts of the social progressives to spin these gains into a success story, the compromise required to ensure these budget increases came at the price of effectively undermining completely the very structure of program funding. For one thing, any budget gains that resulted from a reduction in spending on defense programs-which had skyrocketed during the Reagan era and therefore represented a potential goldmine-would go toward deficit reduction and would therefore not be eligible for spending on domestic programs. And secondly, any increase in spending on domestic programs would have to be offset by a reduction in spending on another domestic program. In other words, the government had to steal from Peter to pay Paul while Caesar sat around spending billions on lances and spears.

Without most people even realizing it was taking place, a profound shift in the paradigm toward government entitlement theory was created by the Reagan policies of tax cuts and deficits. Although no one in the Reagan/Bush administrations came out doing high-fives and boasting that they had undone the New Deal and Great Society efforts put forth by FDR and LBJ, that is essentially what happened. The exploding deficit led to an unavoidable clash of ideologies resulting in a compromise plan to cut the deficit that has left funding for social programs almost irrevocably altered to the detriment of the welfare state. Meanwhile, people like Jack Abramoff are giving our highest-paid federal employees-who were all wealthy to begin with-paid vacations and parties and dinners and gifts to ensure that what money isn't being spent on the military and space programs designed to line the coffers of Bush's big business buddies is going to whatever precious pork plan our leaders desire and not toward taking care of people who aren't lucky enough to have born in the same class of wealth that they were.

CONTINUED...

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/19457/ronald_reagan_budget_cuts_deficit_spending.html?cat=37

As you know, girl gone mad, it is a fail-safe deconstruction of the New Deal. Thank you for being in this fight against these traitors.

[Initech]

9. Reagonomics: The rich get richer, and refuse to give any of it back.

[LaPera]

10. Slimy pig Reagan telling greedy piggy republicans to be as selfish as only fucking republicans can