Hillary and the GOP's Missing Economic Plan

One of the things that drives me to distraction is the way in which the Republican Party cynically uses appeals to religious extremism and racism to sucker voters into voting Republican even though the GOP's economic policies are downright harmful to the financial interest of these simple minded voters.  Positions against gays and immigrant bashing lead still too many voters from looking beyond such bigotry to the poisonous policies that are waging war on the middle class and working Americans.  A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at the economic policies backed by would be GOP presidential candidates versus likely positions to be taken by Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat nominee and anyone rational - which, of course now excludes 50% or more of the GOP base - ought to be fleeing the GOP unless they are a member of the 1%.  Here are excerpts:

So here we are, in the protean stages of the 2016 campaign, and already it seems that we can say, with all the requisite qualifiers, that the issues palette should be reasonably favorable to the Democrats. As matters are shaping up so far, the sense of many people I speak to is that the election appears destined to be about the condition of the middle class, the issue of wage stagnation, and the recognition (finally) that the American economy has been working far better for those at the top than for those in the middle or, obviously, on the bottom.

The salient basic numbers are these. Since 1979, compensation for the top 1 percent has grown 138 percent, while median wages have increased just 6.1 percent. Worker productivity has grown 63.5 percent in this time, and if wages had kept pace with productivity, the annual median wage today, instead of being around $35,300, would be $54,400.

All this has been known for a long time, and groups like the liberal Economic Policy Institute have produced dozens of papers documenting the problem. But middle-class wage stagnation, and the inequality that has resulted as compensation at the top has surged, has never been the central economic preoccupation of Washington. It is becoming so now.

This is happening for a number of reasons, some of which have percolated up by design, others by accident. Certainly, President Obama has taken up the theme of middle-class incomes with considerable energy. Various Democratic-minded think tanks in Washington push the notion as well.
Washington seems to have agreed, around the arrival of the New Year, that the recovery is on and that we have entered a new economic phase. A new phase brings a new set of questions, and the one being asked most insistently these days is: Yes, all the indicators are positive, except wages, where growth has remained sluggish. What are we going to do about that?

The Democrats will face their own drama with regard to these economic questions. What will the presumptive nominee Clinton propose along these lines? How bold will she be? Those desperate for Senator Elizabeth Warren to run are petitioning her not only because they adore Warren, but because they fundamentally don’t trust Clinton to embrace aggressive middle-class populist policies. This is a real concern, and Clinton is apparently going to make us all wait for a while, perhaps until the summer, before she starts issuing ideas about policy.

But here’s the difference between Clinton and the Republicans. She, like virtually all Democrats, accepts the basic fact that wages for median workers have been more or less stagnant since 1979. She probably accepts the idea that this stagnation, alongside rising inequality, is the greatest economic challenge we face. She probably accepts the standard set of reasons that economists offer about why this has happened—globalization, technological change, immigration patterns, a decrease in workers’ bargaining power, the rise in high-end compensation, and various federal tax and wage policies. And finally, she probably accepts that the solutions to the problem are chiefly economic solutions—changing tax policy, giving workers greater “voice,” taking steps to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization, and so on.

The extent to which Republicans accept any of this is far from clear. In six recent books by announced or likely GOP presidential contenders—except Paul Ryan, who surely wrote his book thinking about a run but has apparently decided against it—one hardly encounters the word “wages.” In only one of them, Marco Rubio’s American Dreams, is there anything resembling what you’d call a discussion of wage stagnation. This lasts for all of four paragraphs . . .

To the extent that any of them discuss wage stagnation, they discuss it only as yet another blight visited on America by Barack Obama, completely ignoring the longer historical trends.  Even when Republicans acknowledge the wage problem, they don’t see it as resulting from chiefly economic factors. To them, the main culprits are moral decay and culture, notably the decline of the two-parent family—a father and a mother, it nearly goes without saying.

Here is Santorum on how the American Dream is to be restored:

Conservatives are often criticized for their romanticized view of the good old days prior to the culture shock that was the 1960s. Having said that, let’s make no mistake about it—the greatest threat to the average American’s achieving his dream today is a dysfunctional culture. To heal our nation, we must promote the ideals upon which American culture has thrived for over two centuries—ideals based on timeless truths.

When people don’t see structural economic factors as the problem, they’re hardly likely to hit upon plausible economic solutions.

What instead bursts through the verbiage of his book is Ryan’s irritating combination of serene rectitude and almost total lack of self-awareness. A favorite Ryan dyad of recent vintage was “makers and takers,” his phrase to describe those who contribute to society and those who take advantage of federal largesse. He seemed happy about this slogan. But then one day in 2012, a man challenged him: Who are these takers you speak of? “Is it the person who lost their job and is on unemployment benefits? Is it the veteran who served in Iraq and gets their medical care through the VA?” Apparently, none of this had ever occurred to Ryan. . . 

The great conservative preoccupation, as noted, is culture. If you are a candidate and you want the conservative base to lend you its ear, you must thunder that America’s most pressing problem has to do with values.

Carson seems to have loaned his rhetorical axe to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose deplorable book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an extended pander to the resentful, conservative, evangelical, and probably southern American who doesn’t want liberals who think they’re better than he is telling him what to do. One would call it a dog whistle, except that we Yankee dogs can hear the whistle loud and clear, which is presumably as the author intends.

[Scott] Walker has written a different kind of book from the others. It’s an advertisement for himself, a kind of auto-bildungsroman about his victory over the forces of darkness in passing Act 10, as the anti-union bill was known. The chapters carry dramatic titles—“Bring It On,” “This Is War!,” “You Can’t Recall Courage.” He compares himself to Ronald Reagan.

The Republican Party has spent many years ignoring wage stagnation and dismissing talk of inequality as, in Paul Ryan’s recent phrase, “envy economics.” An interesting dividing line will emerge in this field between those who emphasize these concerns and those who don’t; but even those who are willing to discuss the stagnant situation of the middle class will need to present fresher and less ideologically constrained prescriptions than are on display here.