The GOP - the party of the wealthy in a New Gilded Age?

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The real grand bargain, coming undone

Americans four generations ago were fed up with the excesses of the Gilded Age and set up a system of checks on capitalism that led to a unprecedented prosperity and market stability in the US. All these hard learned lessons are forgotten. And so, the Tea Party people, cheered on by FOX and the conservative choir, and blissfully oblivious to the fact that it is them who will have to pay the bill, zealously chant: "Away with all that!" A fool's crusade. They may just have their wish. It is by now pretty clear that the Republican Right wants to return to the Gilded Age.

 

Only a liberal would see the GOP that way. To me the GOP is the party of people who pay taxes. The GOP is the party of people who work for a living and are becoming frustrated with having to support people who "vote" for a living instead. I'm guessing the stats probably would back that up also. If I had to guess as to what percentage of people on "public assistance" do not vote for GOP I would guess it is greater than 80%. Now true this is identifying the GOP by what it isn't as opposed to what it is, but I'm sure it is reasonably accurate.

 

Snook,
you know what? Liberals earn money, too. Liberals pay taxes, too. Not wanting to allow Wallstreet to rip us all off doesn't make me a liberal. Regulating industries isn't liberal either. That vaunted gilded age wasn't exactly fun and games for the average person. It was a swell time when you were well off, but that's about it.

And as for public assistance, do you include in that retirement money paid to public servants, soldiers for a life of dedicated work, service, to an, apparently not all that grateful nation?

What I don't get about you GOPers is that, when the state does it, checks and balances against abuse of power are all important, after all, ambition must be checked by counter-ambition. Not so in the private sector. There unchecked power is utterly awesome and never leads to excess, as Republican lore has it. Foolishness. Vain or selfish ambition is not limited to public office. Vain or selfish ambition is a fixed feature of human nature. Curiously, Conservatives tend to think that man is flawed and selfish, too - they wouldn't be so enthusiastic about the death penalty if they weren't, and they wouldn't so readily accuse everyone on the 'government take' to me a moocher. But as soon at it gets to capitalism, man becomes a virtuous saint, and insisting on rules becomes "Liberal", if not outright socialism, fascism and capital T tyranny (naturally all at the same time).

When you put out a price and set no rules, or don't enforce any, people will engage in rapacious behaviour to get that price. Just look at that last crash. Republicans ignore that. For them the invisible hand solves everything. Idiotic. The invisible hand is a pricing mechanism, nothing more. It sets prices, but it regulates nothing, let alone markets.

It is utter foolishness to believe that markets without oversight and rule enforcement can work fairly. Rules level the playing field. The actors financing the GOP's Gilded Age campaign don't want a level playing field. They want it all for themselves, and they have succeeded in selling folks like you a bill of goods, namely the idea that it benefits you, too. Not really.

 

Please forgive me as I lost my copy of the "liberal handbook". Which page does it says "blame everything on Wall Street", is that page one or page two?

While you are correct that regulation doesn't have to be a dirty word, overregulation is killing our economy and destroying liberty.

Should there have been regulations to make sure that home loans weren't made to people who couldn't pay them back? Of course there should of. Would it have meant that minorities would be discriminated against, I'm sure it would have. If those loans didn't exist to repackage Wall Street wouldn't have been able to sell them and the investment banks and insurance companies (AIG) wouldn't have ended up in the predicament they did.

Should there be regulations to keep airplanes safe, the food and water safe, and to prevent toxic waste? Of course there should be.

Should there be regulations saying what type of light bulb I can buy? Should the government prevent me from using credit cards? Should they prevent me from eating potato chips? To me the answer to all of those are just no, and those are on a personal level.

Have you ever seen what a business has to go through to build something? My practice deals with a tremendous amount of real estate development. The permitting process to build something is horrendous and that is when things are legit and don't include bribing government employees. You should talk to a small business owner in one of the lefty states. Hiring an employee is almost impossible as the amount of paperwork and tax filings required make it easier to not do so. You have no idea how many businesses don't expand out of fear. I have one client that has maintained 49 employees for many years as pushing them to 50 employees opens them up to an entirely new set of regulations. You should try being a landlord, in the old days someone didn't pay their rent, you would evict them. Try doing that now. Even better, try to research your potential tenant to see if they are "credit worthy" and get slapped with a discrimination lawsuit.

Now in your defense you are correct that the libertarians (who I tend to agree with more often than not) take this to a level of silliness that isn't reasonable in a modern world. There are situations and reasons where regulation is a must. However, the socialists who have taken over the left are using regulation to get there way when they can't get legislation to do what they want. This is far more of a threat to the population then your fears about what the uber rich want.

 

A bit of an aside, but ironically, in Canada, we have an appointed Senate, and it is about as useful as teats on a bull. Bills go first to the elected House of Commons, and if approved, they are sent to the Senate for a second approval, but this is basically a rubber stamp process. There have been on-again, off-again rumblings about making the Senate an elected body, and one of the items on our current Prime Minister’s agenda is to do just that.

 

Good God! I've been erroneously registered as a Democrat!

This is what I find fascinating... I too agree with many libertarian principles, which is why I maintain that libertarian ideals are not the home of either the left or the right.

I also think that if you want to consider yourself a libertarian, you cannot fully be either liberal or conservative. I'll use Snook and I as an example here on two issues that I know we both agree on. (I know, no one here thinks that two such things exist, but believe it or not there are - I could in fact think of four that we are in agreement with.) Snook and I agree that gay marriage should be legal, and that there should only be marginal gun control laws. Most people consider me liberal, and Snook conservative, but it is our libertarian streak that brings us both to that conclusion.

 

I think this single statement can explain all of the disagreements Mr. Snook and I have had in the short time I have been here.

While the GOP certainly sells itself that way, in terms of concrete policy I really can't rationally justify this. If the GOP was really the party of people who work for a living, why would it insist on lowering the taxes of people who don't work for a living, and wouldn't it be in line with what the working public wants and not cut social programs before increasing the taxes on the uber rich- you know, the guys that live off capital gains and dividends? I'm not debating the effectiveness or rightness of these policies, but this is what a working-person party would look like. Instead the consequences of it's policies make it the party of capitalists rather than workers. I ignore and avoid political rhetoric like the plague, so forgive me if there is some hidden moral to their actions, but looking at what they actually do the idea that they are for the common, tax paying person would be laughable if it's reality wasn't so tragic.

Unions. I know you hate unions Snook, but you can't deny that they increase the wages and benefits earned by the tax-paying workers who are part of them. Why would republicans, if they were for tax paying americans, possibly try to strip them of their rights? It makes no sense, especially when you consider the almost entirely hands off way they treat buisness.

International trade. Why would republicans allow major companies to outsource thousands upon thousands of jobs that could have gone to americans without a single repercussion, when something a simple as a high tariff imposed on american companies who outsource labor required to make the product help in solving the problem? Even if that wouldn't work, why aren't they even trying anything? High union membership combined with increased job security drive up wages, you can't deny that, and increased wages are for the benefit of tax paying americans, are they not? There is one class of people they aren't good for though, and it is just those people that they constantly look out for, in the name of "helping us all".

Regulations. Regulations on credit cards, light bulbs, and potato chips don't have anything to do with the real questions of economic security and prosperity that are so pressing in this day and age, and those types of laws are simply incomparable to regulations on economic sectors. It's one thing to decide what a person can or can't do that isn't going to harm anyone else, it's a whole other thing to decide what an economic giant can or can't do that most certainly is going to affect a lot of other people. Freedom in the former means freedom for everyone to do what they want, freedom in the latter means freedom for those with the most capital to harm those with less.

And unless you consider the government inquiry into our recent crises to be a liberal attempt to blame wall street for everything, i'd say there's a lot more fact to be had in blaming unchecked profiteering than you give it credit for. I try to see things from your perspective, even agreed with you to a point about the credit card debate we just had, so i encourage you to give my thoughts the same courtesy, and not immediately brand me as the enemy. We both want the same thing here, policy that benefits the inhabitants of this nation as a whole. Namaste.

Ragusa- it isn't just corporate funds in elections, it's unlimited corporate funds in elections. I couldn't believe it when Keith Olbermann suggested a revolution. I never watch him, but to actually know that that was said on live tv is astounding.

One last thing- Democrats aren't the solution to these problems either. Just sayin'.

 

That is like saying the GOP is the party of people who don't sodomize their pets. While I am sure the incidence of such people in the Republican party ranks is 100% (or extremely close to it), that doesn't mean the party has a monopoly on such people. The majority of people on both sides of the political divide pay taxes, obey the law, and are more or less decent human beings. That doesn't fill the ballot boxes, though - much better to say "We are THE party of working people, they are THE party of loafers and layabouts that want us to pay for them." Just out of curiosity, does anyone have a recent survey showing party affiliation per income level?

In general, the GOP's platform promotes the interests of the highest income bracket (low high-end taxes and regulation, low public spending on areas not vital to that group - such as healthcare or retirement benefits), and argues that this will lead to things being better for everyone as a whole. Yes, I can agree they are the party of the wealthy, although that's not necessarily a good thing, if their ideas would work for everyone. I don't think they do, though, really - if anything, focusing on the status of the middle class (which now I'd say are those making between 60 and 200K per year is a better idea; there are more of them, they are more likely to create growth and more efficient in doing so, and more efficient in transferring some of their excess income to other groups.

Overall, I have serious doubts about the GOP's underlying principles. Taxation and spending the big issues; the rest - abortions, gay rights, and the like - is usually a case of a propaganda issue that should boost party support, but imo isn't inherently tied to the left or right end of the spectrum. The GOP is set against any tax increases on high-earners and large parts of it actually want to decrease taxes (maximum income tax rates, mostly) but those are at some of their lowest levels after the WWII. I oppose their views, because a) growth was generally faster in the 1990s (and most other post-WWII decades), under higher rates, and b) the economic growth of the last several decades has afaik led to gains mostly in the top bracket, with little if any improvement (when you factor inflation) elsewhere, ergo the current tax structure disproportionally benefits that group. They also want to cut spending, mostly on issues more important to the lower and middle class such as public support for education, infrastructure spending, "entitlements" (social security, Medicare, Medicaid - these are mentioned much less often by name, I think). I disagree somewhat on that - while some minor cuts can be made, and measures should be taken to control further rise of costs, these are either spending areas where not spending now can lead to bigger losses in the future, or where the state is providing services the population already paid for. As for cutting public spending, I am also wary as it can immediately reflect on the market - as a major employer and provider of many projects serviced by various companies, the state serves as one of the few sources of stability and dependable contracts. Large cuts can have serious negative impacts at a time the economy can hardly handle them. In general, I also disagree that the deficit at present must be reduced at any cost - you save for a rainy day, not on it. Crises and downturns are when a state borrows, ideally it has prepared for that by running low or no deficits prior to that... of course, that didn't happen in the 2000s, what with a war being waged during a period of tax cuts.

As for regulations killing the economy, that is quite overstated - and deregulation hasn't done much better. The economy is being held down by the aftershocks of a recession caused by a major housing bubble which involved major banks and other financial institutions. Regulations had little to do with that, and what it did was mostly via the repeal of Glass-Steagal - so the crisis had much to do with deregulation. The previous major economic shock was when the IT bubble burst. Before that it was the savings and loan crisis. When not caused by commodity prices like oil, crises are more often than not happening in rapidly booming markets with little regulation. Now, regulation can, and often does impose some additional costs, and I do not doubt that there are issues where it goes too far. However, the "regulation = bad" mindset that I often hear tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater by rolling them back way too much. In order to save a bit more today, it risks losing a lot tomorrow - and often enough that's what happens. Plus, to some extent I think the atmosphere of fear of regulations can be more damaging than the regulations themselves - a perceived threat can be a powerful deterrent. No doubt many businesses hold down and don't expand out of fear, but the question is what creates that fear and how justified it is.

 

@damedog

I'll try to explain it to you. The left seems to irrationally focus on the highest income earners and forget that the majority of the Bush tax cuts benefitted the other brackets. As you well know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The government cannot and never has been able to create jobs or wealth. The people who create jobs and wealth are entrepreners and therefore wealthy people. Focusing on the "trust fund babies" is blinding yourself to the true focus of reducing taxes on the higher income earners. It is the guy who makes $1 million a year who owns a manufacturing company that creates jobs.

As to social programs, the "working" people really don't care about them as they don't use these programs as they don't need them. Now when times are good and money is plentiful taxpayers don't mind spending money on them. When times are not good taxpayers do mind spending the money on them. It is the exact same thing as charitible giving. Charities are hurting right now as donations are down pretty much everywhere due to people not having the ability to make donations. It is the exact same thing.

As to ignoring political rhetoric, I've read your posts.

Yes, I hate unions. There are two types of unions. Public service unions are one of the reasons are municipalities are going bankrupt. Private unions are committing murder/suicide and are to stupid to realize it. Long ago they stopped working with management to ensure the strength and profitability of the company and the workers and instead have focused entirely on the workers. This is making them less competitive globally. Look at the recent example of Boeing. Airbus as been gaining on them for years and recently they have gone to the NLRB to prevent Boeing from building a plant in North Carlolina as that is a "right to work" state and therefore wouldn't have to be unionized.

International trade- I don't know how "outsourcing" has become the fault of the GOP. I also don't think the WTO would allow us to impose a "penalty tax" on outsourcing companies.

You focused on the regulations that are intruding on our personal freedoms and ignored the regulations that inhibit business. Instead you focused on the "rhetoric" that the big evil businesses are out to get everyone.

I can't tell you how much I wish there was legislation which would force everyone to be a small business owner for five years so they would realize how intrusive and how foolish the government actually is.

 

Funny story. Care to take a guess in which country Airbus has most of its employees? After you guess that you can also try guessing how highly that country rates in union activity?

Yeah, it would work both ways. Penalizing capital mobility outside of your country would likely result in penalizing the capital transactions in your country. Preventing your companies from investing abroad seriously damages their competitiveness.

 

Yeah, that's true. You can't blame the GOP for everything. The main reason that companies outsource is that American's won't work for 25 cents per hour.

 

@Shaman,

While I can't provide stats as to which party is more likely to sodomize animals (although I have a suspicion), I don't think your analogy is a good one. Yes, there are liberals who have jobs outside of government, but there is no denying that a large portion of the Democrat base are people who are on welfare, are government employees, and/or do not pay any taxes. I believe the corollary is also true that the vast majority of people who are in the GOP base are people who pay taxes.

As Clinton said "It is the economy stupid". While I agree with most of the social policies of the left, it is jobs and my wallet which matter far more to me. I believe that when push comes to shove the vast majority of "workers" will vote based on the economy vs. voting for social issues.

 

As for being on welfare, it depends on where you're looking. For cities, yes, a large portion of the population on welfare is african american, and most african americans vote Democrat. However, have you seen areas in the rural south? There you see a lot of poor people who are both white and black, and seeing as how most of the south votes Republican, a lot of those receiving welfare are Republican.

The hispanic and black populations of most of the middle of the country are quite small, and thus they tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican, but certainly there are people there receiving welfare who are not exclusively Democrats.

There is one aspect of your comment that I will concede. A quick check on a few government websites yields the following information. 40% of welfare receiptients are caucasian, 38% are african american, 18% are Hispanic, and the remaining 4% is lumped into "other". In looking at that breakdown, we can say that caucasians and hispanics are under-represented on welfare relative to the percentage they comprise of the US population. However, african americans are over-represented. 38% is about double what their percentage is in the general population. Since african americans overwhelmingly vote democrat, there are certainly more democrat welfare receiptients than republicans ones.

In fact, we can make a rough guess here. If we overlay race with party affiliation and assume that the percentage of people on welfare mirrors those who aren't on welfare (which may be erroneous, but it's a mental exercise) we can make a rough estimate. Since 95% of african americans are democrats, we can say that 36% of welfare receiptients are black and democrat. Since 70% of hispanics are democrat, that means about 13% are democrat. Since 40% of whites are democrat, that's another 16%.

So 36 + 13 + 16 = 65%. So that's about 2 in 3. But it still means 1 in 3 are in the "party that pays taxes".

 

Neither party has a monopoly on wage earners (at all levels). There are a lot of rich democrats and a lot of poor republicans.

Neither party has a monopoly on representing religion. A substantial number of democrats go to church and there are a lot of pastors who have entered politics in the democratic party.

Neither party can claim they are the most compassionate. There are great acts of service on both sides of the aisle and acts of callousness.

Both parties have pushed for tax cuts.

Both parties have pushed for tax increases.

Both parties believe in individual rights (just in different areas).

Both parties believe the government must be strong (again, just in different areas).

I've found the main difference between the democrats and republicans is the way they want to help the citizens -- democrats want to make sure people who are down are taken care of and the republicans believe the best way to help a person is give them a job. Both sides are right and both sides are wrong -- neither is the only (or even best) solution.

IMO people are fooling themselves if they don't believe the democrats are watching out for the wealthy. Look at the members of congress -- nearly every one of them is in the top 1% wage earner bracket and they got elected by knowing a lot more people in the top 1% as well. Politics is the sport of the wealthy and both parties play the game.

 

Well, it's hard to deny, because we need to clarify what constitutes a "large portion". 10%? 20? 30? We are talking about millions of people in any case, after all . A lot of people are on welfare right now or work for the government. I don't know how many people pay no taxes - quite a few pay no income tax, but when you count payroll taxes, excise taxes and so on, I'd expect the number of Americans who pay no taxes whatsoever would be very low. Didn't we go over that several times?

By the same measure, I wouldn't deny the majority of the GOP pays taxes. Then again, so does the majority of the democratic voters or independents. It is claiming that party X is THE party of something, and party Y is THE party of something else, that tends to go into partisan exaggeration territory.

 

As always Jon Stewart has said it as good as it can be said: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/thu-august-18-2011-anne-hathaway Check out the first half.

 

T2,
you're right to say that both parties represent moneyed interests, including their own, and about US corporate media, essentially owned by Oligarchs, pursuing their owners interests and according narratives, how else to explain the otherwise inexplicable disappearance of Iowa straw poll #2 Ron Paul in the news.

So, yes, all that is true, but democrats don't nearly go as far as Republicans go. The Democrats deregulate Wall Street (Democrats favoured repealing Glass-Steagal) - but GOP extremism is entirely in a league of its own. It's the Republicans go out and wrecking safe that protect the 'average man' (consumer protection, union rights are part of these safeguards). It's the R's who want to privatise Medicare, retirement of government workers and all that.

Well put, though you paint with a broad brush. The difference is gradual, not absolute. Not even the Democrats want to help the people who are down by keeping them on the take, they want them to get a job soon as well. Unlike the Republicans they realise that one doesn't generate jobs by sheer willpower. There were plenty of people able and very willing to work hard during the Great Depression who weren't given the chance to work.

Naturally, for today's Republican stalwarts today that is no problem, after all the almighty invisible hand will feed them. That is IMO as unrealistic as ultimately callous, since it suggests basically that if you're poor and down and on the government take, it's probably your own damn fault and you don't deserve better.

 

That seems to be stating the obvious, given that, even with no other assets or income, a Congressman's and Congresswoman's salary alone would place them in the top 3%.

You're exactly right. A family of four making $50K a year won't pay any income taxes, and nearly half (the figure I saw for 2010 was 47%) of all Americans didn't pay any federal income tax in 2010. I wasn't among them, but whatever.

However, everyone pays payroll taxes, excises taxes, sales tax (I'm assuming they buy *something* in the course of a year), and if they drive a vehicle, tax on gas.

Head, meet wall.

 

Considering that the US has typically a low voting attendance and the unemployed are generally lazy voters, I would figure that most of those who vote at all are paying taxes.

 

Actually, the Bush tax cuts don't benefit the lower income brackets as much as the revenue generated from taxation would, and the Congressional Budget Office agrees with me that is the least efficient thing we can do to stimulate the economy: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10803/01-14-Employment.pdf

Not only that, but even registered Republican millionaires who own corporations (!) say that the idea that tax cuts for the rich creates jobs is "baloney": http://www.fox4kc.com/news/wdaf-the...her-millionaire-says-20110817,0,7362562.story

And working people do care about cuts in social programs. According to the Gallup polls, a majority are against cuts in social security and anti poverty programs. http://www.gallup.com/poll/145790/americans-oppose-cuts-education-social-security-defense.aspx


I also don't understand when people say "create wealth". What exactly do you mean by that? Capitalists only really create wealth for themselves. And when has the united states government ever even tried to make it out in the market? The only thing I can really think of, and correct me if i'm wrong, is the bank of North Dakota, and they actually seem to be doing quite well and have been for some time. Besides, the millionaire who creates jobs also takes them away whenever it is most convienient for him and him alone. The doctrine of "government is always bad in the market" doesn't seem to be supported by fact, simply because there hasn't really been a major attempt to do so. And the government does create jobs, what about all those teachers and police officers? They're government workers, aren't they?

I agree to a point about your perspective on unions. Threatening the long term sustainablilty of a company to ensure greater riches for yourself is indeed wrong, and they should cooperate with management. However, I really don't know enough about the in and outs of the workings of unions to say if this is a big problem or not, but I will say that I do believe unionization is a right and should be protected, and should be available across all sectors. But my idea of unions (and correct me if this is already what they do, like I said unions aren't my expertise) is that they should recieve the highest wages and benefits that the company could give them without harming the company itself, and when things are bad everybody in the company should sacrifice, this means the shareholders as well as the workers as well as the exectuives.

I also don't think that outsourcing is the direct fault of the GOP, but I blame both D's and R's for not doing a single thing to stop it at all, and I think neither party is an effective representative of our interests. I'm aware that the WTO would most likely rule against it, but i'm also against the WTO in it's current structure as I believe each country has the right to it's own trade policies and an outside arbiter harms an economy in crises much more than it helps. Besides, they allow China to put tariffs on our goods yet don't allow us to do the same. We shouldn't accept this and can't if we expect a major recovery.

How did I ignore the regulations that inhibit buisness? I mentioned that the two are incomparable, as they deal with two seperate types of entities in seperate activites that have vastly different consequences. What regulations are you talking about that you say are a detriment to (moderate to large) buisness?

Working as a construction helper and finance manager for a (very) small buisness myself, I actually agree with you on this. There are some regulations which are at odds with fairness and reason when it comes to the capability of small buisnesses to be up to their standards. However, these aren't things that I really support. The types of regulations I support are wage standards, enviornmental laws, and workers comp, and ones that stop criminal or negligent activity.

I also thought this was interesting. Apparently Republicans are opposing a tax cut for the middle and working class. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/22/300832/republicans-to-oppose-tax-cut-for-working-people/