Pushing back against New Deal revisionism

Add comment March 9th, 2009

 

 Jonathan Chait does a MASTERFUL JOB of debunking the suddenly fashionable revisionist history of the Great Depression, the New Deal, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Ideas? We don’t need no stinking ideas!

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Here’s the STRATEGY currently pursued by House Republicans while the nation faces the worst economic crisis in 80 years.

 POSTSCRIPT: Conservative pundit David Frum says the GOP should be a party of ideas rather than obstructionism, but he gets CLOBBERED by the Limbaugh dittoheads for daring to speak such heresy.

Defending Obama’s economic policies

3 comments March 9th, 2009

 The Wall Street Journal, ordinarily anti-Obama in the extreme, allows Laura Tyson (above) to get a WORD in edgewise.

The party of ‘No!’

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State gun instructor shuns ‘liberals’ who dared to vote for Obama, ‘the next thing to the Antichrist’

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America needs more solid citizens like THIS GUY. And he’s armed, too.

A new Applesauce feature: The Reagan Record

6 comments March 9th, 2009

 

 When they’re not waxing apoplectic over what they see as the socialist schemes of President Obama, Republicans these days are nostalgically pining for the good old days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

 It behooves me, then, in the interest of truth, to establish what will be a recurring feature here at Applesauce — an occasional series of items aimed at dispelling some of the myths of Reaganism. We’ll call it The Reagan Record.

 Our first installment is aimed at the fiction that the Gipper was invariably a tax cutter, never a tax raiser. This comes from an essay by Joshua Green published six years ago in the Washington Monthly:

It’s conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman [Reagan’s first budget director, David Stockman] recalls, “No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan’s watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was.” Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly–but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year’s reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike–the largest since World War II–was actually “tax reform” that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn’t count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives–and probably cost Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection–Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84…

Reagan continued these “modest rollbacks” in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history–an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, “there is no justification” for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period. In addition to broadening the tax base, the plan increased standard deductions and personal exemptions to the point that no family with an income below the poverty line would have to pay federal income tax. Even at the time, conservatives within Reagan’s administration were aghast. According to Wall Street Journal reporters Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray, whose book Showdown at Gucci Gulch chronicles the 1986 measure, “the conservative president’s support for an effort once considered the bastion of liberals carried tremendous symbolic significance.” When Reagan’s conservative acting chief economic adviser, William Niskanen, was apprised of the plan he replied, “Walter Mondale would have been proud.”

A human embryo is not a baby — or even a fetus

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 In light of President Obama’s intention to sign an executive order today lifting his immediate predecessor’s ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a few thoughts based on my understanding of the issue:

 A three- or four-day old human embryo, called a blastocyst (microscopically shown above), consists of about 100 cells. By comparison, the brain of a common house fly — note, just the brain, not the whole fly — consists of more than 100,000 cells.

 So, we’re not talking about a baby here. A potential baby, yes, but not an actual baby.

 We’re not even talking about a fetus, which is defined by Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as follows: “an unborn or unhatched vertebrate esp. after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind; specif: a developing human from usu. three months after conception to birth.”

 The potential advantage of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) over adult stem cells in the scientific search for therapeutic breakthroughs for disease and injury is that ESCs are not yet differentiated. That raises the possibility that they can be differentiated by researchers into any tissue or organ in the human body — a promise that does not pertain to adult stem cells, which is exactly why so many scientists prefer to work on ESCs in the first place.

 A recent poll SHOWS that most Americans favor easing restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, but most Republicans — and most elements of the Religious Right — are opposed.

UPDATE: Uh-oh! Limbaugh wannabe Glen Beck has got this embryonic stem-cell thing all figured out. He SAYS it’s a scheme, willingly abetted by Obama, to create a master race.

Darn right-wingers! They’re getting so smart that it’s hard to put one over on them anymore.