The net result of Reaganomics

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by iceaura, Jun 24, 2019.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So don't. Nobody else is.

    Just to keep the record straight, though: The Republican Party slid from Nixon-level plausible deniability into fascism in 1980 at the latest - the year well known populist demagogue Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the Presidency by proclaiming his support for "States Rights" from a podium just a few miles from the site of a recent and famous KKK lynching of civil rights workers (they had been trying to help register black people to vote). He was bringing the George Wallace vote into the Republican column, as Nixon had -

    it worked, as before, but in addition he hung onto office despite the inevitable violation of oath and criminal negligence of duties that follows from that ideology (such as it is); in part because his geniality and folksy charm combined with his mental problems to grease his escape from serious disparagement and accusation (people had a hard time imagining him as an evil conspirator, regardless of the evidence piling up in all directions).

    If you need less subtle evidence, you can start the clock on Republican Party fascism in 1992 with the emergence of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Frank Luntz. The GOPAC memo, for example, was nothing if not obvious - as was the awarding of the honorific "Majority Maker" to Limbaugh by some members of incoming Republican Congress in 1994, while attending the annual convention of American fascists at which Limbaugh was the hero of the hour.
     
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    As I said previously, it started with Gingrich.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    So?
    I am attacking Reagan's response. Try to pay attention, eh?
    It is. And it's not complicated - it's all in the public record.
    For example: Clinton did repair some of Reagan's economic vandalism (fighting Republican opposition all the way), but the notion that he "balanced" the budget depends on accepting his juggling of the books of Social Security (as Reagan's administration had set up and then done, by design, in their SS "reform").
    And it's easily verified common knowledge. It's just stuff that the victims of thirty years of Republican media campaigns don't know any more. Amnesia is diagnostic feature #1 - no serious negative consequences of Reagan's union-busting? You live in the bubble.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    You also said the Republican Party went downhill after W. Those two claims conflict, and neither one is accurate.

    Reagan cam long before W. Gingrich came before W. So did Limbaugh. The Republican Party's slide into fascism was well advanced - all but complete - by 1994. W ran in 2000.

    It went downhill with Reagan, after a false start with Nixon (Nixon was not a likable guy - so unlike Reagan he didn't get away with all his crimes. Like Trump, in that way, although Trump is much closer to Reagan in most ways).
    It went farther downhill to get to Clinton's impeachment. From then on it hasn't changed much - it hasn't had anything to change; it is what it is.
    Since W and including his tenure, in other words, it's been a fascist Party acquiring power.
     
  8. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Do you consider unions to be a success story?
     
  9. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    My point was H.W. Bush wasn't much of a problem. Gingrich was.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Where and when?
    They've obviously been losing, after all, in the US since Reagan. That's one reason we have the immigration problem we do - breaking the unions opened US manufacturing and production employment back up to the whims of organized capital, as before the unions imposed a few basic curbs.
    Gingrich was a problem, Reagan (who early on adopted some key Gingrich political ideas and tactics) was a problem, HW Bush was a problem, Limbaugh was a problem, Luntz was a problem, Murdoch was a problem, even Clinton was a problem - everybody with power or influence who threw in with Reagan's agenda was a problem.

    The Republican Party slid into fascism between Nixon and Reagan, and former oil company executive HW was head of the CIA at a significant time in that transition - it hardly took him a year, after being elected President, to gin up a war with former CIA ally Saddam Hussein over the cheapest high quality oil on the planet.

    H inherited a Republican Party that was a lost cause, partly of his creating. As with other supporters of Eisenhower, he faced a choice when Nixon threw his hat in the ring - and he chose wrong. He ended up in Reagan's administration, went from there to doing things like appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and allying the US with the likes of Kuwait's and Saudi Arabia's princelings.

    Not ok, and a serious problem, that guy.
     
  11. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Was FDR the last/only administration that you liked?
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    I think they were a success story in their day. Better worker protections, easier movement between employers and crackdowns on things like company stores have made them largely (not completely) irrelevant.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    They know no other way to post.
    - - - - -
    And the stage I labeled "syntax collapse" begins to emerge from the background.
    - - - -
    Without the unions, all that stuff is being rolled back (beginning with it being outsourced - bringing the US labor forces into direct competition with unregulated employment, which puts pressure on them to acquiesce - individually, lacking union support).
    Meanwhile the growth of the illegal immigration problem - one of the first creations of Reaganomics in its union busting phase, dating to California before his Presidency - never got tolled forward.
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    No. Other employers doing bad stuff does not equate to US employers doing bad stuff. False argument.
     
  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    So you have nothing (other than your soliloquy about "they")?

    By the way, emigration would be a problem for a country, not immigration. Competition isn't a problem either.
     
  16. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    what is a
    ?

    it amazes me how people have a pre conditioned filter to perception when it comes to unions.

    do they consider neighborhood watch groups the same as unions ?

    it is a sure warning sign of a very selfish person, possibly borderline narcissist or fascist
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2019
  17. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    Company store, refers to a period in the early 1900's where a company might employ most of the people in town and own/run the only local store as well as in a mining community so the company paid workers but got most of it back at the company store and through company owned/provided housing.

    For someone not making all decisions based on knee-jerk emotions, there are many reasons to question unionism.
     
  18. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Reagan came before Gingrich. It had already "started" with Nixon, before Reagan.
    - -
    Hard to have one without the other.
    A quick netsearch turns up company towns all through the 1900s and into the 2000s. Whether they generally featured company stores would take some work - and careful definitions (is it a company store if it takes money only - no scrip or digital equivalent?).
    - - - -
    - - - -
    Your eyesight is not my problem.
    Just replying in kind - only with relevance. Google is your friend. (I have helped by posting more links than most, and relevant ones to boot).
    - - -
    - - -
    No such argument appears. Observation appears.

    The US employers are doing bad stuff, to whatever degree possible and directly in consequence of being able to - part of that newly increasing ability (such as the rollback of New Deal protections, especially unions) includes setting their employees in individual competition with the national and now global market for employee services. Such a badly distorted or "unfree" market will normally move toward and settle into a suboptimal equilibrium ( so reliably the trend can flag, even measure, market distortion).

    (deregulated capital possesses the power to act, the mobility to act rapidly, and the knowledge necessary to act efficiently and cooperatively - deregulated labor does not. )

    Reagan's setup distortions, as is standard and even definitive for "rightwing" ideologies, favor capital. If unlimited personal and intergenerational accumulation be allowed (or even just too high a limit) an aristocracy justified by self-originating (divine) wealth will take over - this is what history, as well as theory, shows as most likely by far (to the point of inevitability), and what we have seen since Reagan's (loosely attributed) restructuring of the US taxation and regulation system.

    Theory, mechanism(s), and record of fact - as solid as it gets.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/american-factories-have-one-very-big-problem

     
  20. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Let's face it. You just like to argue.
    For me, that which is most bothersome to me, started with Gingrich.
    For some people, the concept of a company store in a company town is derived from the early 1900's.

    You could call Detroit in the 1960's a company town I suppose but then again we were talking about a company store.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Of course.
    You didn't notice what was going on in the Republican Party until Gingrich made it too obvious to overlook - you've made that clear.
    That means you didn't notice what the Republican Party under Nixon or Reagan was doing. So that's settled.
    And some of these people think that those "company towns" went away in the early 1900s, as well - disappeared, for some reason.
    There are lots of ignorant people, sure - and it's a fairly obscure aspect of US history, especially in its increasingly racial nature (the US Steel and other corporations's reliance on local police and courts to provide indentured "employees" from the black population of several southern towns in States of the Confederacy is seldom presented in schoolday's history books, for example).

    Even so, even without the more complete historical context, that the Trump Presidency is a continuation of a forty year trend in Republican Party politics (including economic policy) should be obvious. The President most similar to Trump in US history is Reagan, after all.
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2019
  22. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    You wouldn't feel the need to refer me to Google had you actually cited support for your claims. Just more of the same avoidance from you. Yawn.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I don't.
    Just helping out, with a bit of sarcasm well justified - your eyesight is never my problem.

    (what we might as well call "Rightwing Astigmatism" - an inability to see things, presented as if it were evidence of something, being almost universal among the rightwing apologists and history revisers and general parrots on this forum).

    Meanwhile, we have the current state of the US economy as restructured under Reagan and according to Reagan administration principles, about ten years after the first big Crash - an economy in which the default rate on credit card debt held by small banks (including a newly inflation created subprime category, shucked off by the major banks as if they would be immune to the bubble pop) has doubled in a little over two years - from 3 and a fraction to 6 and a fraction.

    Clinton's restoration of suboptimal stability having been cratered by W's administration, and Obama's administration having been unable to dig out of that hole in the face of Congressional blockade, the incoming bubble bust will happen under the legal oversight of around 200 newly appointed partisan Republican Federal judges - many of whom have little if any litigation or trial experience, all of whom regard the current US economy as a strong one rich in opportunity for everybody.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2019

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