Establishmentarian commentators like the New York Times’ David Sanger seem almost as flabbergasted by the breadth of President Obama’s legislative ambition as by the stunning collapse of the the global economy. The comparisons to Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, or some hybrid of the two, are coming fast and furious. We’re also hearing more and more talk about the end of the Reagan Revolution.
If [Lyndon] Johnson’s rallying cry was an end to poverty in the world’s richest nation, Mr. Obama’s is an end to the Reagan Revolution. With the proposed tax increases on couples making more than $250,000, Mr. Obama has declared that trickle-down economics — the theory that the entire country benefits as the nation’s richest amass and spend — was a fantasy. He denounced it in moral terms, declaring in his budget that “there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.”
Before I comment on this new phenomenon in political reporting, I want to ask you if you have ever looked at a chart of the highest marginal tax rates since the income tax was created in 1913? Take a look because it’s instructive. Obama has made some sweeping proposals, but he hasn’t proposed restoring tax rates to anything close to what they were for the first six years of Reagan’s administration, let alone the 91% rate that prevailed under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Ask yourself a question. If every dollar a CEO made over $500,000 was taxed at 91%, would he or she bother asking for 20 million? Would any board even consider giving 18 million to the government just to give two million to their CEO? Of course not.
So, while we are entering a new progressive era that will be similar in many ways to the era of Roosevelt/Truman and the era of Kennedy/Johnson, we’re not there yet. The Republicans will continue their decline for some time because they don’t have ideas suited for the circumstances the nation is facing, and if they’re going to win the presidency they will need the Democrats to start an unpopular war in Korea, Vietnam, or some other country. It won’t hurt if the Republicans can find a likable war hero in the Eisenhower mold. But don’t worry about Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal becoming president because it isn’t going to happen.
The Reagan Experiment has ended in abject failure leaving the diehards, a la the Marxist-Leninists, to argue that it just wasn’t implemented correctly. But the Reagan hangover isn’t just the shattered global economy, it’s thirty years of stinking thinking that is so ingrained in the public that it will take a long time to unlearn. Obama is making strong steps in the right direction but, as the pendulum swings, we’re still far to the right of where Reagan left off when he retired. That’s not a knock on Obama. He doesn’t want to stun the system. It’s like adjusting the pH level in an aquarium or pitching yeast into a beer wort. You have to avoid making changes too quickly or everything shuts down and dies.
We can argue about how progressive Obama is, but he’s pushing aggressively enough to stagger the political commentariat who thought they’d killed this kind of thing off.
…[Obama] appears to have shed President Clinton’s fear of being labeled an old-fashioned liberal.
They also thought they’d cured of us of this trash-talk about the gray areas of capitalism, as Al Giordano points out:
From September’s reference to “crony capitalism” to yesterday’s “chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” the howls from the vestigial simpletons of Cold War mythology (they swallowed the lie that there are only two items on the economic menu: “capitalism or communism”) will continue to scream bloody socialism… and the vast majority of Americans will continue to yawn and tune them out.
In other words, we have a president who dares to question the efficacy and morality of unfettered capitalism. Times have changed. And it’s hard to believe I had to argue that Obama was progressive, and progressive in a way that the Clintons are not.
