Chocolate is good for the brain and memory. I don’t know how much that is hype but I welcomed hearing that on last night’s news. Maybe my consumption of the stuff will counteract the short night sleeps I often get when I’m trying to solve the world’s problems. Its just after 2 AM and after close to four hour’s sleep (not bad for me) I woke up agonizing about how the Republican Party has reinvigorated some long discredited notions about economics. Its made for good electioneering but that’s only if you take short term election success as your measure. This could be the last election cycle it works for the GOP in this mid term election before the old white majority of voters begins to peter out.
I won’t go into any depth…..in fact I’m out of my depth on this but I’ll put down some bullet points before retreating to proofing and editing the three recent “tenterhooks” posts that by now are already old news.
Government spending and borrowing have been doe see doeing forever. Time and again great nations have been brought to their knees by taxing themselves to death for great egos and warfare. Israel’s King Herod, Robin Hood’s King John and a great many other’s lost favor by being accused of overtaxing the nation to build Temple and other public amenities or financing great wars like the Crusades, in John’s case for his vainglorious brother Richard the Lion Hearted. And yet such public spending can take an economy and help it break from the doldrums. The North’s Civil War spending, despite the debt, pushed its economy into the stratosphere that kept up despite a couple of recessions until the Depression. FDR’s modest domestic spending during that time edged the nation away from recession but it was finally conquered by the massive military spending unleashed by Pearl Harbor. Hitler had taken Germany out of its Depression even earlier by building up his military and even avoided blame for too much taxation by simply stealing the wealth of the Jews to help finance his world take over.
The argument between guns and butter continues to this day. Not making a choice between them is what tarnished LBJ’s Presidency. He wanted both when the GOP only wanted the war spending because it suited their appeal to patriotism. Actually this is not quite true. In my youth the GOP had pretty much conceded the point that John Maynard Keynes was right about government spending’s power to get an economy moving. They had been saddled with Herbert Hoover’s fabled inaction for forty years by the time I became politically active. They were all Keynsians according to an economic mantra of the sixties and seventies. But they would soon abandon Keynes when they resorted to their “Southern Strategy” to win elections. The South had benefited greatly by FDR’s spending but had been very stingy doing its level best to make sure black southerners got nothing. The traitor LBJ began throwing money at poor blacks in the South’s estimation and this after enforcing their Constitutional right to vote in 1964 by trampling all over the South’s much cherished Jim Crow State’s Rights.
Suddenly all the Republican Keynesians were on the run and replaced by small government Southerns who only wanted to spend money on Defense, being the great patriots they were. George Herbert Walker Bush from that old discredited pre-southern GOP jabbed at the ascendant Southern appealing Ronald Reagan by calling his Defense spending plans “Voodoo Economics.” He shut up about that to become Vice President and then watched as Reagan borrowed like crazy to pay for Star Wars which did indeed help bring the Soviet Union to its knees at the cost of a massive Federal Debt. It was the debt that the old GOP found disagreeable but not the new GOP. It discovered that it could go into debt and then let Democrats take over and beat them up for the Debt by reducing federal Domestic spending for things like the War on Poverty.
The old Democratic accusation that Republicans were all about “trickle down” economics lost all its sting in the age of a thousand billionaires and the biggest prison population in world history.
So this is what woke me early this morning. Its why I didn’t vote in the primary election for the first time in my life and while I will barely give a damn when I vote in the general election next week. Our politics today is mentally stunted. We need more minorities to wrest the economy from the old white folks who were given so many economic protections during LBJ’s Great Society that today they live well and long while one-in-five American children go to bed in need.
Now on to that unpleasant editing I promised myself I’d get to.
