Beginning last year or so the tea partiers became aghast.  Where did all this accumulated debt come from?  They rolled out all the usual cultural suspects, the blacks, the immigrants, the poor, the liberals, the elderly, those, those, uh, unnamed forces- the "thems" and "theys" of their nightmare world.  The anti-American Americans identified by Sarah Palin and others, those shabby nameless enemies of the nation had to be to blame.  
    Yet in money matters shouldn't the ones who've stolen all the money have something more to show for it than a tin cup and a shopping cart filled with all their worldly possession?  Where are all the fine threads, new cars and vacation homes?  It's hard to convince anyone that the poor are hoarding all the money when the poor don't have any money to hoard.  Else they wouldn't be poor anymore would they?  Hmmm, the usual suspects routine is getting pretty hard to swallow this time around.  
    Especially since we had a banking collapse and executive pay has only increased and the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer.  Well, OK then, it must be the superrich who've victimized us.  Nope.  The tea party are supporters of the ones who created and have profitted from the deficit.  This tea party seems a curious place for a populist to be.  But more on that later.  First a little, very little, history.
    Because, of course, it was Ronald Reagan, the tea party hero/god, who was the father of our modern debt troubles.  No doubt about it, all the books show it.  The groups around his administration invented something they called "supply side" economics as if economics only had one side.  Everyone knows there is a demand side to economics as well, and when these two "sides" act in concert they make a whole and let an economy grow and flow.  No one ever thought before to say one was better than the other, just different sides of the same coin, until the republicans came along and said supply side was more excellent than demand side.  This is a little like saying that left hand turns in driving are far superior to right hand turns and should be employed exclusively to the extinction of the alternative.  Physicists will note that this would have the primary effect of leaving one to always go in circles. 
    So that in a nutcase is what they proceeded to do.  They divorced expenditures from revenues, pretending that discussion of the former was too good and ideal to involve the latter, abased with crude reality and necessity.  Now naturally sometimes they gave lip service to cutting expenditure too but somehow it never quite came to pass, partly because with an ever expanding population and ever expanding responsibilities in the world costs continue to rise.  
    Of course, in a sound well run economy government revenues would have risen along with the natural healthy expansion of the economy.  But since the republican theology didn't account for revenues they didn't.  Revenues haven't been allowed to keep pace with expenditures and so huge yearly debt ensues.  
    Actually the world of revenues stopped like a broken clock in 1980, or thereabouts, thirty years ago.  Since that time it has been verboten to consider tax increases as a way of increasing revenues. Only tax decreases as a means of raising revenues may be used. And since tax decreases generally don't generate revenues, well, you see the problem.  
    Now some might think it odd, others even magical, that somehow in thirty years though the prices for every single thing we buy, from food to gas to military armaments to health care to education, has increased substantially, the cost of government, of running the world's largest economy, has remained static and even declined.  It's something of a miracle I suppose, though less so, if you consider that the only way running the world' largest economy could ever cost less is not if you were actually running it but only if you are running it into the ground.  
    Not coincidentally, most people are no better off, many far less well off than they were in 1980.  Two wage earner families barely make it by on what single earner households lived quite comfortably on in those reviled good old days of the sixties and seventies.
     These were those horrid days when America was the envy and wonder of the world with its damn unions and Roosevelt era reforms still in place, and balderdash dreams of the Great Society and all that nonsense was still humming along quite effectively.  Then we took a wrong turn.  Oh, no excuse me I got it wrong, I don't mean to confuse you, what I really meant to say was that all that prosperity and abundance we had when we were the envy and wonder of the world was what was so desperately wrong.  This wicked prosperity was the result of the wrong turn, and it was from all that prosperity that the republicans in their wisdom thought we had to deliver ourselves. Well, by God, they've certainly succeeded.
   This brings us to the corollary tenet of the republican ideology: that the wealthy should receive special attention and care for the sheer charm we have in watching them succeed far beyond our capacity to ever emulate them.
    So once upon the time the story goes, at some cocktail party or other (it surely had to have been drunken), a guy named laugher or Laffer I mean, doodled a crude graph on a napkin.  It purported to show scientifically (it was written down on a napkin, after all) the ills of the nation were traceable back to the piteous plight that ensued because the poor wealthy were being overtaxed.  Laffer, laughingly (we assume) claimed that if a tycoon's income (not wealth) was taxed over a rate of about 50% he would become morose, distempered, listless and cease to go to work everyday with the same  gusto.  Therefore it seems that the enervating propensity of wealth could be cured by giving the wealthy greater incentive to acquire more enervating wealth.  This was the long term structural change needed to solve the short term economic downturn we were currently in, a brief respite from an economy that was otherwise wonderfully prosperous, called ominously, stagflation.
    This was the "malaise" that Jimmy Carter once spoke of, ruinously to his own future.  It was true then there was a self-inflicted malaise and it was traced to the ennui of the extremely well to do, the wealthiest one percent, which then "trickled down" to the rest of the country infecting us all.  We were suffering for them and with them it seems though no one seemed aware of this at the time. Therefore to solve this great imaginary (Jimmy) Cartesian crisis, the geniuses who handled Reagan (who, poor dear, obviously knew nothing of economics at all- he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's after all), developed supply side economics.
    This put forward the deviously clever principle that the more you cut taxes, preferably exclusively for the exceedingly well-to-do, the more revenues you would raise from taxes.  Who knew?  Seriously, who did know?  No one that's who.  In thousands of years no one had ever stumbled upon such an obvious truth.  When you boil it all down what it means is this: the less hard you work the more you benefit.  Many in the republican party have built their entire political careers on this one simple thesis.
    Still don't believe it?  You can try this at home, or wait, in our economy unless you are extremely rich, you probably already are trying this at home.  But if not, go ahead and ask your boss for a decline, a decrease, an unraise in salary and just sit back and watch the money start rolling in.  There is a free lunch.  Congress has found it and it's called supply side economics.  Most of its adherents in Congress haven't worked hard a day in their careers, two day work weeks and endless vacations and elaborate junkets and all that.  They are so good they can spend money like drunken imperialists without having to raise taxes to pay for it.  Flimsy excuse for war?  Close enough.  At one time taxes were thought to be the great governor on their profligacy, because they'd have to explain why they were coming to the public asking for more money and explain what they were going to use it for.     
    No more.  Supply side ended all that.  Most of this wonderful prosperity you feel washing over you today, this no worry economy, is attributable to this simple ingenious theory, the magic money of supply side economics.  Where's the Nobels?
    In any case, based on this impeccable logic you had what came to be known as Reaganomics rule the land or as George Bush sr. called it, "voodoo", others had other colorful names for it as well, maybe more to the point.  It's proponents claimed that even if you cut taxes - across the top, of course, never across the board (after all the wealthy are not only our neediest citizens but our politicians' fondest friends) - and increase expenditures with say a massive increase in military expenditures as Reagan did to face down the mighty Russians in their declining years there would still be no deficit.  Or if there was, because of course, there was, it would be temporary until this new burst of creative greed based energy, like electric shock treatment, awakened our filthy rich and their new genius enterprizes (like Enron and Goldman Sachs and outsourcing overseas, and subprime mortgages and oil spills in the Gulf and all the wonderful things they've done for us lately) kicked in.  So that is what they did, cut taxes for the rich, again and again.  
    Thank God for them, thank God for these formerly idling rich.  But sadly, it didn't kick, it just didn't kick.  I guess they kicked back rather than kicked in.  Until 12 yrs. on, after the first Bush's first term, between them George and Ronald had stacked up far more debt than we had accumulated in our first, oh, two hundred years.  The cumulative debt when Reagan took office was $900 billion, whew, that's a lot.  In 1992 it was $6 trillion.  Oops.
    OK so it seems their calculations were just a few trillions off, (what are you perfectionists?) it did not shake their resolve that their deep economic theories were right.  So where was the tea party then, you might ask and their concern with out of control deficit spending?  Well, we don't know, but we do know that when that evil Clinton was in and was going to raise marginal rates marginally on the most wealthy and least numerous among us, they were undoubtedly outraged.  The last thing this mortally ill, deficit retching economy needed was new revenues.  This would wreck the Reagan debt creation machine.  And it did too, though not one single republican in congress voted for it, crying doom and gloom and ruination for the economy.  Because supply side theology didn't acknowledge that demand side economics existed how could it work?  But what do you know Clinton balanced the budget and the economy boomed far more than it ever did under Reagan or (jumping ahead half a Bush) either Bush.  
    Therefore in three successive presidencies it seems that supply side economics, tax breaks for the wealthy, blind deregulation and attacks on the social structure had delivered exactly the opposite of what the theory promised.  Seemingly none of their hoary old theology was actually true.  But the republicans and their as yet unidentified tea party members lurking in their midst were still undaunted.  Never let it be said that any true republican has ever let an actual fact come between them and a bogus ideology.
    Because then George Bush II was elected and like a dauphin controlled by his minister at the start of his presidency he was run by his own acolyte, Dick Cheney.  It was he who memorably said that deficits don't matter, that Reagan had proved it ( he always did have a keen grasp of history).  This bunch then proceeded to spend money like Abu Dhabi princes, all unsecured by taxes which had been cut to pander to the very wealthy (often coincidentally including themselves) by plundering the treasury of its resources (Again!) and deregulating like unindicted co-conspirators.  Finally eight years later with the country on the brink of bankruptcy, now ten trillion dollars in debt (see what he did there?) as a last gasp Bush opened the checkbook and bailed out the miscreants who he (and many others, including Clinton) had spent so much time deregulating.
    There was once a hard lesson learned from the Great Depression, that as hard as it is to stomach in such times, even counterintuitive to some, one may have to acquire debt to pump up expenditures on the verge of a depression to avoid falling into the canyon entirely.   When the well's running dry and the pump's sucking air you've got to prime it with more precious water to retrieve a steady flow again.  They didn't have the guts to do it in the thirties and again this time they've understimulated the economy which remains weak as a starving coyote.  When the private sector is not spending the public sector must increase spending to account for the shortfall and keep the entire economy from the edge of the cliff and potential collapse.
    This is necessary debt made necessary by all the unnecessary debt acquired over the last thirty years of republican supply side economics.  And this was what faced Obama when he took over.  By all accounts he did good service to keep the economy from getting much worse.  Unfortunately he did less well in choice of economic advisors some of whom had been there at the inception of
the crisis and behaved badly by allowing the exceedingly corrupt and unethical banking industry to remain unregulated.  As a result his administration has not gone far enough either in stimulation or in regulation.  
    Of course he was being opposed at every turn by the very republican masters of misrule who really created all the problems that he was  now put in the difficult situation of trying to solve. And now we see again what we first saw in the Clinton administration - that the only time the great republican tactic of concern over deficit spending seems to arise is at the outset of a democratic administration.
    But now we have the tea party too.  They are on record as expressing outrage, pure livid, unrestrained outrage at whoever it was, wherever they may be.  Obviously they thought it had to be Obama because he's a black Muslim foreigner. But inconveniently, George II according to Pew Fiscal Analysis who added some $6 trillion to the deficit and Obama only $1.7 trillion (including tax cuts) mainly to clean up Bush's messes and try to stimulate and beguile the economy back  from the threshold of depression.  And as we've seen, as much as it was it still wasn't enough. 
    So by my offhand count, not meant to be rigorous, three republican presidents created something like $12 trillion in debt and one democratic president, so far, has created less than two trillion. His was necessary and probably not even enough, theirs was entirely gratuitous, they bought us nothing, helped the infrastructure not at all, established no programs of note or merit and still managed to put us in hock up to our ears.  In fact, the last five democratic presidents reduced debt as a share of GDP the last four republican presidents increased it.    
    So,who created all this debt?  The answer to the tea party is - you.  It was you who kept voting and giving money to and carrying the water for the people who treat politics and economics like they do global warming, as a fantasy sport, like fantasy football, where no one ever gets hurt so who cares for truth. Politics is like theater, unreal, just like that wonderful world of science whose findings by all means should be shunned (if not burned)  like the Salemites of long ago did witches.
    So, OK now this tea party really must get it, they must be chastened by now for all the harm they've done the country.  They have met the enemy and it are them.  They must be shocked and outraged and embarrassed beyond belief to discover the depths of the deficit problem their inattention and prejudices have done so much to create.  Finally, at long last, maybe they will listen to all the people and experts who have been railing against these ruinous policies from the beginning. Economics is real with real consequences, they understand now that an economic policy actually has to make sense and to work and have been proven in the real world and carefully applied.  It is not just a poor adjunct and afterthought to abortion policy or prayer in school.  Politics isn't just about who is winning with the most bluster but who is governing honestly, capably and well.  And surely they have to understand by now that a political party sworn to serve all the people in the country as well as the long term interests of the country itself cannot continue to direct all its policies to the benefit of only the wealthiest one percent of the people and expect the outcome to be anything but disastrous for everyone else.  Nope.  None of the above.
     But wait then what do they propose to solve the massive deficit problem?  It seems they are redoubling their support for exactly the same type of people and policies which have created the very problems that have brought the country to the brink of ruin and decline (even to their own individual economic detriment).  
    So after starving the nation of its largess, its resources, for decades and skimming the cream off the top of the American dream and redirecting it into the coffers of the very, very well-to-do, who never, ever let it trickle back, they express surprise that America suddenly seems but skin and bones, in debt and in decline.  And then they still claim it must be the fault of the very poor who are even skinnier than they are?  
    Name it what you will, whether endless gullibility to the big lie when aggressively repeated as propaganda, loathing for the poor and minority who might receive a smidgin of benefit from living as free and equal citizens in America or just supine, serf-like subservience to the golden idol of wealth, is not material. Frankly, they aren't deep enough to deserve analysis.
  Yet that they continue to support failed policies and morally weak politics to fix the same policies that these failed policies and morally weak politicians created merely for political expedience so that they may continue to do their worst against us, is not just madness it is group psychosis bordering masochism. It is like the guy who has dug himself into an twenty foot hole from which he can't get out hollering up to one who might help him: "OK I see my problem now, my shovel's too small, I'm going to need a bigger shovel if  I'm going to dig my way out of here."  
    It's different this time they say.  This time they will demand that there be no deviation from the supply side - feed the rich, starve the poor - economic theory which they have slavishly followed for thirty years.  They will allow for no revenues to be raised to control the deficit and they will make no deals with anyone and anyone who crosses them will pay.  Nice. More like the Committee of Public Safety than an American political party. 
    So this is the end of the republican party as we've known it.  It's dying not with a bang but a temper tantrum.  The last election was their last hurrah.  They have no where to go from here but down. They have sold out the country for the last time.  If President Obama plays his cards right and, though a lousy negotiator, he does see the larger political picture clearer than anyone in America, he will not only win reelection but the democrats should have a real chance to win back the house and hold the Senate.  If so the republicans won't control either again for a generation.  They'll still raise trouble and havoc on the local level, sponsor a book or witch burning now and again and maybe even have a good idea or two, perhaps even elect a president occasionally.  But they are spent as a coherent political force in our times.  
    You can fool some of the people all the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.  You'd think the present day leaders of the much degraded Party of Lincoln might have been familiar with the adage. 

 

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