Mondo Frazier wrote a column for The Hill on why the Tea Party exists and why they have a future. It’s an interesting piece, but one part of it caught my eye. Here it is:
At the Tea Party events that I’ve personally covered, the majority of the attendees appear to be in the 40 and older range. A significant portion of them remember an America prior to 1964: an America with significantly less government.
You’d have to be 46 to have been alive in 1964, and closer to fifty to have any memory of a time before then. And, really, three year-olds don’t have memories about the size of government. So, why did Mondo choose 1964 as his cut-off? I mean, Medicare and Head Start and the various war on poverty programs were passed in 1965 or later, not in 1964. But, you know what passed in 1964? That would be The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which effectively ended legalized segregation.
His story also suffers from basic factual inaccuracy.
Some remember when their paychecks reflected 95 percent of what they earned — instead of the 55-67 percent that government allows them to keep today.
Here’s some reality:
Rather than keeping 95 percent of what they made, under Eisenhower (you know, prior to 1964) the wealthy actually kept 9% of what they earned.
To have kept 95% of what you made, you would have had to pay almost no income tax. Social Security tax rate in 1963 was 3.625%
Looking at that chart that I linked to, what’s the big deal about paying another 2% to keep SS solvent with present rules until the 22nd century? Somehow that is “off the table”.
SS helps non-rich people. That’s the big deal.
Government assistance is ONLY for the rich and ultrarich. The servants and serfs can be replaced without difficulty; thus there is no reason to spend money assisting them.
I remember the USA before 1964 very well. Government was very big! NASA was going strong. The military was huge, with troop commitments all over the world. It was just assumed that you would spend two years in the Army after graduation. Even Elvis was drafted. Government purchases were fueling the Electronics boom (similar to the later internet boom). Airlines and their fares were tightly regulated and the anti-trust laws were vigorously enforced. The fairness doctrine was in effect and TV news had to produce alternate viewpoints instead of ignoring them. The interstate highway program was completing or just completed. The ICC regulated trucking with check points and log books. A commission (forgot the name) did the same for railroads. The FDA actually inspected meat! It was Nixon who came up with the idea of just checking the packer’s written records instead of the meat going out the door. Whenever you bought a roast, it had a blue inspection stamp.
We were going to the moon, going to have limitless power, fantastic medical advances, and the federal government was leading the way. It was a great time to be alive.
Forgot FCC regulation of AT&T (the telecom industry). Content regulation of TV and radio shows (the seven dirty words). Strict regulation of banks, including mandates on interest rates.
I had totally forgotten about that blue-ink inspection stamp on the meat.
It was a great time to be alive if you weren’t black, especially in the South. That’s why it is a little nauseating that these Tea Baggers keep romanticizing the time before 1964 as some golden era. The government was as big as ever, taxes were astronomically high, but you didn’t need to share a lunch counter with a black man, so things were just great.
It’s a literal whitewashing of history. This country was an apartheid state prior to 1964. Never forget that, or gloss it over.
You realize it’s just dogwhistle code, right?
It’s not an accident, or stupidity. They do it that way deliberately, so that they can maintain their plausible deniability about not being racist – all they need is a thin veneer, just enough so that other white folks won’t call them out on being racist.
Yeah, I know. That’s why I bothered to point it out.
Who is Mondo Frazier anyway? I’ve never even heard of him before this post. He’s not even C-list wingnut(like Dinesh D’Snooza)
Well, a lot of that big gubmint the RW actually likes even if they don’t want to acknowledge it.
Big gov-funded interstate highways so the well-scrubbed didn’t have to get in those public transit vehicles and actually have to rub elbows with the riff-raff. Interstate highways also available for the military to use to move troops and materiel in case all those hippies (or beatniks) got out of hand.
Gov’t censorship, quietly, of what went out over the public airwaves — only 3 tv networks, no public tv, and those plus a number of the major print dailies all heavily infiltrated by CIA since the 1950s (see Bernstein, Carl, Rolling Stone 1977 article). The RW doesn’t like the Pentagon and CIA to be criticized.
All those gov’t-enacted tax loopholes for the rich. Yes, the tax rates looked impressively high — 91% — but the number of those paying that rate, or even the next highest ones, was fairly low. If most of those in the highest brackets actually had to pay at that rate, they would undoubtedly have been fiercely lobbying business-friendly Ike to lower them. But they weren’t because instead they’d long been working the back door — lobbying to open up more and more ways to avoid paying high taxes.
The only people I know who are nostalgic about the 50s are the ones who weren’t yet born then. All they know about it is crappy and deceitful TV shows and ugly design that went on to become “cool”. And the bankrollers of the gov-hate propaganda mill are pretty much all the good folks who have gotten rich for half a century off of Eisenhower’s Abomination, the “Defense” highway system.
That is the real point of all of this. The 50s were a great time if you weren’t black, Chinese, Latino, gay, of draft age, female, or skeptical about the wonderfulness of America, Christianity, and capitalism. I suspect that the only thing these windbaggers really remember are Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, along with all the government-sanctioned “anti-communist” propaganda.
I suppose you can’t entirely blame these dumbasses for being angry at their loss of undeserved privilege — Marie Antoinette, the Redcoats, Joe McCarthy’s enforcers, and myriad other of history’s losers were no doubt pretty pissed, too.
What does somehow continue to shock me is that even insignificant pimples on the face of journalism like The Hill is run by editors who have no problem being megaphones for outright, deliberate, verified lies by propagandists like “Mondo”. It’s frightening that their market is supposedly made up of government functionaries and the rest of the media. Is there no part of our upper crust that isn’t composed entirely of crap?
Is there no part of our upper crust that isn’t composed entirely of crap?
Is this rhetorical?
I agree with you there, Boo. But we had hope of fixing our problems. The Civil Rights movement was beginning, so was the Feminist movement. People had hope in a better tomorrow. Today we only have fear of what will be taken away next to turn billionaires into trillionaires.
8.5 million job losses with Bush’s tax cuts. Damn, I’m glad that those rich folks propped up the economy. Think where we’d be if they hadn’t had the Bush redistribution of the Treasury of the United States.
But, but, what about the increase in Freeeeeeedom™?
Freeeeeeeeedom™ is a registered trademark of the Republican National Committee. All rights reserved. Used with Permission.
Not just bullcrap. Total bullcrap.
Politico, the Hill, and other Village penny papers are constantly full of bullcrap.
I wonder why so many blogs take them so seriously and link to them frequently.
That was written by a person who doesn’t remember life before Reagan. Or is completely bought out by Freedomworks.
Maybe he’s thinking of those great economic times under Herbert Hoover; and we all know how well that worked out. Prosperity was right around the corner!
Hard to find many people who remember those times. Even McCain is too young. Maybe his mother would know.
But how about Carl Reiner’s 5000 year old man (or however many years it is)? must remember Hoover
Thanks for posting this, BooMan. Awesome graph–totally nails it.
As long as we are on the subject of dogwhistles, here is what Richard Burr’s branding is this year. His signs are white letters on a black background, the tag is “Elect” instead of “Reelect”, and there is no identification of party.
In fact, no Republican is advertising the fact that they are a Republican candidate.
I thought that was very interesting.
I noticed this as well. And talk about an enthusiasm gap – the street corners are littered with signs and they are ALL Republicans. Not that you can tell, because they don’t mention that fact.
I don’t think that means anything but the Democratic campaigns have not had their sign days yet. I expect Democratic signs to bloom within the next two weeks.
Along with a ramp up in advertising.
What interested me is that the Republicans are running as “non-partisan” and incumbents are forgoing the incumbent advantage of saying “reelect”.
So what we need is a few hundred thousand day-glo stickons reading “Republican”
Yes, but the fact remains that “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.”
During the time we have spent checking this little piece of bullcrap, five new pieces of bullcrap have been invented, distributed and believed by “conservatives,” and the paladins of the people in the “liberal” media.
Anglo-American empiricism is dead in this country. It’s all phenomenological bullcrap among “conservative” “intellectuals”: if you experience it as being true, it’s “true” enough.
I think the effective tax rate on the wealthy was somewhere around 50%, though. That’s a perfect rate, in my opinion. About 25% or something on people making $50-60k to be fair.
With all of the deductions, my parents paid something like 10% on their federal income taxes last year (I know because of FAFSA). They bring in about $100,000 before taxes. And yet, they only paid 10% (federal, not total).