Comment of Gail Collins' NYT column 1/30/10

Greetings Obamadogs contribitors,

This is my pasted comment on Gail Collins piece in Saturday's New York Times. Called "An Inconvenient Truth," it is about the rise of selfishness and the decline of "social capital" in our politics and society. She concludes with a line to the effect that "It's irrelevant how we got here. We just need to get out." Here, then is my view, for what it's worth.

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Figuring out how we got here is not entirely irrelevant to getting out. Republicans, in particular, have a short memory, sparing no audacity in acting as if the fiscal insanity of cutting taxes, passing a huge unpaid-for prescription drug add-on to Medicare and fighting two wars off budget weren't major contributors to our current predicament.

And it's important to remember that Ronald Reagan not only failed to shrink government and balance the budget as promised; instead, he allowed the national debt to triple under his Administration. The few who prospered at the expense of the many deserve to pay their fair share in repairing the damage of an economic policy that was little more than a stacked deck that Democrats didn't have the courage to call out for what is was: the very "class warfare" that would silence any move to restore fairness and shared responsibility to the tax code.

Letting the Bush tax cuts elapse is not enough; a modest 5.6% surtax on incomes over $1 million could generate $400 billion in revenue, which in turn could finance a real jobs bill able to put a decent dent in the unemployment rate, thereby cutting into the deficit by replenishing tax revenues depleted by the recession and unjustifiable tax cuts that grew the chasm between the economic haves and have-nots more than the macro-economy as a whole. Such a fiscal correction would be tagged as un-American, socialist, and an assault on economic freedom, to be sure; and yet it would fall considerably short of the progressivity in the federal tax system employed under Dwight Eisenhower. Then, as Kevin Phillips has noted, there were six brackets for the top 1% of incomes, with the highest marginal rate two and half times greater than is now the case. To deny the failure of supply-side economics to meet a fairly conventional standard that Republicans like to pay rhetorical lip-srvice to, as if only they can meet it -- spending within our means, or raising enough in means to balance with spending -- is to divert attention from a sensible and fairly traditional way of digging out of the hole we're in, by old-fashioned notions of hard work and fair play.