Letter 2 America for May 2, 2014

Dear America,

I woke up this morning thinking about an old girlfriend from high school.  It was more than fifty years ago that we had a six week romance of sorts, though I never even kissed her.  She was charismatic, pretty, independent minded and popular within a certain alternative kind of crowd, to which I too was drawn.  We all wanted to think about things other than the prom and where we would be going to college, so we read Hesse's Siddhartha and waxed existential as we listened to Stan Getz and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and most importantly, we recognized that we knew next to nothing.  Lynne was my Beatrice as I look at it in retrospect.  Every once in  awhile, I indulge in subjunctive speculation about what my life would have been like if I had been different from the 17 year old adolescent that I was.  I had one of the most lastingly memorable moments...one of the most beautiful...of my life with her the night we became a couple.  She was having a party and the rest of the group was out in the living room as we met by chance in the kitchen.  We stood in the subdued light across from one another in the small galley and talked for probably half an hour; a conversation that in my memory was profound and incisive, though who knows what the reality was.  Then, all of a sudden, she swept across the six or seven feet of floor space between us and threw her arms around my chest as she put her head down on my shoulder.  If you had seen her at that moment you would know why that was such a memorable moment for me.  For the first time in my life I felt loved by someone other than family.  I was buoyant with emotion as I held her for what seemed like an hour.  We were inseparable for the following six weeks, but then I had to tell her how I felt.  I loved her, I told her, and she was stunned...stunned and frightened.  She told me she was not ready for such depth of emotion, and I broke off our relationship as a consequence.  There were signs in the following days that she wanted me to reconsider, but I was unable to accommodate her even though I wanted nothing more.  Thus, when I think back on that brief period--on those halcyon days of youthful romance--they look like the perfect love story...up until I screwed it up.

I am married now, though not to Lynne, and our two children have graduated from college and moved out on their own in pursuit of romances of their own, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  I love my wife and I don't want to be with anyone but her.  Yet still, when I think of those days with Lynne they are pristine and enticing, even if my memory is less than accurate, which it may well be.  My point is that as a nation, we seem to continue to have a romance with an illusion from decades ago and we fail to either appreciate or shepherd the common weal we enjoy today.  And the romance is with a presidential administration and era that was less than extolled by the masses when it was occurring.  Of course, I am talking about the Reagan era.  I read a piece from the American Enterprise Institute, which is euphemistically described as a conservative think tank, the equivalent of observing that Mussolini was partial to brown shirts in my opinion.  In that piece certain propositions on which the supply-siders rely were reiterated as if they needed no perspective from which to be assessed, but like all economic data, the one piece on which they doted was far from expository.  They cited what they called the longest period of economic expansion and the largest increase in federal revenue ever accomplished during a presidential administration.  But what they left out was that as a share of GDP, revenue fell drastically initially when Reagan cut taxes, and rebounded only partially thereafter.  They also neglect to mention that a growth in federal revenue can be as reflective of high inflation as it is of high earnings and productivity, which it was in the first eight years of the 1980's.  Add to all that the fact that while the accumulated wealth of the top 2% of the American plutocracy has gotten much richer, the average worker has stayed in place as his economic well-being is measured in current year dollars, and what is expected of him by his boss has steadily increased, inconsistent with the stagnation of his income.  So, when the AEI dwells on a couple of numbers that favor the notion that prosperity "trickles down" and increased wealth among the few "floats all boats,"  the reality is something different, yet the Republican Party, and especially conservatives within it, continue to float these ideas, and what is remarkable is that the American people seem to continue to accept them.  We keep having elections and we keep standing still with the Democrats having their hands on the throttle while the Republicans stand steadfastly on the brakes.  We are going nowhere, and the Republicans complain that it is the Democrats who are causing the inertia, which was the point of the AEI article.  So what is the Democratic Party to do?

Well, I say that they should set about disabusing the American people of the canard that the eighties were the good old days by pointing out what the policies of the Reagan administration left us with besides a few misleading statistics about federal revenues and prosperity as defined by corporate profits.  Inflation in 1980 was nearly 14% and unemployment went from an already-high level of 7.5% in 1980 to just shy of 11% at the end of 1982.  So, while federal revenue may have climbed, that is hardly an indication of the well-being of the American people or their economy.  Add to that the fact that while Reagan lowered taxes for the wealthy few, he then raised taxes of all kinds fourteen times during his administration...not on the affluent mind you.  And then there is the Clinton administration, fraught as it was with problems of various kinds.  Taxes on the highest bracket of income recipients were raised despite doing so, Clinton ushered in the longest bull market in the history of the stock market.  People bought houses and cars in record numbers, but unfortunately, Clinton also listened to Larry Summers and signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which left the financial industry free to give us the depression of 2007, and Newt Gingrich prevailed upon him to sign the package of legislation that they tried to call "welfare reform,"  which took from the unemployed most of their access to federal financial help during such periods unless they could prevail on the Tea Party congress to extend unemployment benefits.  That's the strategy I think the Democrats should use: Reality Therapy.  It's time we stopped waxing poetic about an era that turned back the advances of the working class by decades and began the reprise of the rapacity of the Gilded Age. And by the way, the Republican vote against the increase in the minimum wage is just more of the same, which should be an albatross around their necks, not a badge of distinction.

Your friend,

Mike