broad public and a small minority possessing astonishing wealth, is inherently vulnerable. It took a combination of brilliant political leadership on the right and an awesome mixture of political ineptitude, personal arrogance, and cultural elitism on the part of liberals to give Armey and their allies their current position of power. (I sometimes think that Renaissance Weekend killed the Clinton administration.)
But despite the triumph of 1994, there is always the risk that someone will point out that there are now quite a few men in America who each make more money every year than the entire House of Representatives, and that it is these men who will be the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the new majority’s politics.
As far as Armey and his allies are concerned, the answer to this risk is simple: The public must not know how well the rich have done compared with the rest. If a new study points out just how much income and wealth have become concentrated, deploy the forces of the conservative media to attack the data with every spurious argument imaginable. There are always plenty of places to publish such attacks and people to write them because the rich are different from you and me: They have (a lot) more money. In particular, they own magazines and newspapers, and readily support think tanks staffed with people whose job, whatever its formal description, is to support the interests of their donors. As H. L. Mencken once pointed out, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.
The uneasy politics of free-market populism are also probably a major reason why the Republican majority in Congress seems determined to mount an assault on economic analysis in general—not only to eliminate the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, but to eliminate all National Science Foundation funding for the field, and to slash the budget of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (which provides the basic data on national income).
The irony is that much of this research provides support for Republican free-market ideology. But the motivation for cutting the funding is easy enough to understand: If your doctrine depends on a view of the economy that is flatly contradicted by reality, then the fewer facts, the better.
Edward Wolff has written a good book, while Richard Armey has written a terrible one. The real message, however, comes from the contrast between them—between the mildly liberal economics professor who is disturbed by the trends in our society and would like to make a small effort to ameliorate them, and the tough-talking conservative who is determined to deny the reality of these trends and to smash anyone who reports on them. May the better man win.
The Lost Fig Leaf: Why the Conservative Revolution Failed
“You now work from the first of January to May just to pay your taxes so that the party of government can satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less admirable than what they would do with it…. Somewhere, a grandmother couldn’t afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a family couldn’t afford that first home because there was just not enough money…. Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy.” The words are Bob Dole’s (actually, they’re Mark Helprin’s, but Dole said them after accepting the Republican presidential nomination). They are the key to understanding why the Republican Revolution, which seemed so unstoppable at the beginning of 1995, ground to a halt within a year.
Dole’s speech tried to put over, one more time, the fiction that the federal government takes away your hard-earned money and spends most of it on things that only social workers want. Supply-side economics, with its promise
But despite the triumph of 1994, there is always the risk that someone will point out that there are now quite a few men in America who each make more money every year than the entire House of Representatives, and that it is these men who will be the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the new majority’s politics.
As far as Armey and his allies are concerned, the answer to this risk is simple: The public must not know how well the rich have done compared with the rest. If a new study points out just how much income and wealth have become concentrated, deploy the forces of the conservative media to attack the data with every spurious argument imaginable. There are always plenty of places to publish such attacks and people to write them because the rich are different from you and me: They have (a lot) more money. In particular, they own magazines and newspapers, and readily support think tanks staffed with people whose job, whatever its formal description, is to support the interests of their donors. As H. L. Mencken once pointed out, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.
The uneasy politics of free-market populism are also probably a major reason why the Republican majority in Congress seems determined to mount an assault on economic analysis in general—not only to eliminate the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, but to eliminate all National Science Foundation funding for the field, and to slash the budget of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (which provides the basic data on national income).
The irony is that much of this research provides support for Republican free-market ideology. But the motivation for cutting the funding is easy enough to understand: If your doctrine depends on a view of the economy that is flatly contradicted by reality, then the fewer facts, the better.
Edward Wolff has written a good book, while Richard Armey has written a terrible one. The real message, however, comes from the contrast between them—between the mildly liberal economics professor who is disturbed by the trends in our society and would like to make a small effort to ameliorate them, and the tough-talking conservative who is determined to deny the reality of these trends and to smash anyone who reports on them. May the better man win.
The Lost Fig Leaf: Why the Conservative Revolution Failed
“You now work from the first of January to May just to pay your taxes so that the party of government can satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less admirable than what they would do with it…. Somewhere, a grandmother couldn’t afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a family couldn’t afford that first home because there was just not enough money…. Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy.” The words are Bob Dole’s (actually, they’re Mark Helprin’s, but Dole said them after accepting the Republican presidential nomination). They are the key to understanding why the Republican Revolution, which seemed so unstoppable at the beginning of 1995, ground to a halt within a year.
Dole’s speech tried to put over, one more time, the fiction that the federal government takes away your hard-earned money and spends most of it on things that only social workers want. Supply-side economics, with its promise
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