Getting Government And The Economy Wrong

When Rick Perlstein, a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, wanted to offer an example of how conservatives have gotten government wrong, he talked about chickens.

These are chickens that are carrying a chemical that is used to make plastic forks and spoons, because the chemical, melamine, is in food fed to the chickens imported from China. That corrupted feed came into the country through the extraordinarily porous screening of the Food and Drug Administration.

Perlstein said that the inability of the FDA to keep feed with this chemical, which also has been detected in pet food that caused the deaths of an untold number of pets this year, from entering the country is an example of how conservatives have crippled government to the point that it cannot keep us safe. “It is one of the ways conservatism is incinerating a pillar of our civilization,” he said.

E.J. Graff, a scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, read a moving article she wrote for TomPaine.com days after the Katrina disaster. “Ours has shown to be a government willing to turn its back on the most basic of American moral values: banding together to take care of each other in ways that no one of us can do alone,” she said.

That theme was echoed by Beth Shulman, a labor lawyer and consultant, who chronicled the increasing struggles of families working under the burden of slipping real incomes and a loss of basic rights, such as the inability to take time off to take care of sick children without fear of losing their income or their jobs. Conservatives call deregulation freedom, but “this is a false freedom that forces us to make false choices.”

What is needed are minimum wage and workplace standards, a leveraging of resources for common needs, and a commitment to insure that children have the tools they need to succeed. In other words, she said, a commitment “to insure that the prosperity of our economy is broadly shared.”

William Spriggs, chairman of the economics department at Howard University, showed one chart that demonstrated the difference between the effects of conservative policies and those of progressive policies. Mississippi, which has low tax rates that are supposed to attract business and good jobs, and stringent and stingy social welfare programs premised on the Reagan-Bush mantra that self-reliance is all that is needed for prosperity, the poverty rate among female-headed households is at 52.5 percent. In New Jersey, “which does all of the things that progressives say you should do,” the poverty rate in that group is 19.5 percent. The message? “It’s the policy,” Spriggs said.

Spriggs also noted that since the 1930s the economy has generally done better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. “We have to stop being defensive. When we do things to the economy, we do them well,” he said.

Tamara Draut, a scholar at Demos, said that for young people today, “getting ahead is an elusive state of affairs….The legacy of conservative government will be “the first generation that will not be better off than their parents.”

Median incomes for both men and women between the ages of 25-34 have fallen since 2000 in 2004 dollars; and men most dramatically: from $44,257 in 2000 to $36,400 in 2004. Median incomes for women fell from $29,556 to just over $28,000. Even men with bachelor’s degrees have lost income in 2004 dollars; women see a slight increase. College students now also have on average doubled their post-graduate debt load since 1992, she said, with the average debt for a bachelor degree holder is $19,300.

Michelle Ciccarelli, a lawyer at Lerach Coughlin, the firm that represented shareholders with fraud claims against Enron , traced the flow and ebb of market regulation since the 1929 stock market crash. The Enron crash was the climax of a period of dismantling controls on corporate behavior, and precipitated attempts to restore a modicum of accountability. But she warned that there is a multi-front effort to restore the regulatoro conditions that allowed Enron to happen.

Jacob S. Hacker, picking up a theme from Shulman, said that the freedom offered by conservatives is “the freedom to lose.”

Through the privatization of income security plans, deregulation and “the studious denial that there is a problem at all,” the effect is “We have seen a giant risk shift from the broad shoulders of corporations and government and onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.”

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future