Thank G-d For Bruce Bartlett

Bruce Bartlett, in case you didn't know, was once a pillar of the Reagan-era conservative establishment.  In fact, he drafted the tax cut that became the signature piece of legislation for Reagan's term and, arguably, his political legacy.  But, after his service in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, his views on tax cuts and their economic effects shifted, and it cost him his insider status among Republicans and their supporters in Washington.

Yet that is all the more reason that, whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, or anything else American, you should stop what you're doing right now and take a look at Bill Moyer's interview with Bartlett.  It will help you to understand why what seemed to many people like a good idea in 1981 has not aged well with regard to the results it has produced.

If you read it, you will see that there are three major takeaways from it:

First, that the tax cuts currently being proposed by congressional Republicans will only go into the pockets of the wealthy, creating no new wealth (or higher wages), and further depressing already historically-low interest rates.

Second, that the cuts will be paid for by working Americans, through the loss of valuable deductions and the slashing of public benefits (Bartlett specifically cites the recent experience of Kansas as an example of how something similar has in fact already happened).

Third, that historically, tax cuts have not in fact produced higher wages, and that a colorable case could be made for the view that, far from raising wages, tax cuts arguably depress them (here, Bartlett cites statistics from the period after the enactment of the 1986 tax reform bill).

What do we need, then, as an alternative to tax cuts?  Bartlett doesn't seem to have a problem with taking a $20-trillion-dollar national debt and adding an extra $1.5 trillion to it, so long as it's done not with tax cuts for the rich, but with infrastructure spending that would, in addition to repairing our deteriorating national physical plant, create jobs, generate tax revenues, and encourage consumer spending--in other words, actually help narrow the annual deficit and ultimately begin to pay down the national debt.  And now is the time to do it, he says, while historically-low interest rates still exist.

We desperately need, as a people and as a nation, to get out of the trap of thinking that comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted is the fuel that we need to get our economy soaring and restore some sense of "normal" to our lives.  My hope is that Bartlett's words will help, but I have to wonder why, if his common-sense advice is so obvious, we haven't heeded it by now.  Even as I type, GOP members of Congress are still trying to square their ideology with reality, and are coming up with nothing.

In the meantime, thank G-d for Bartlett.  May his words be echoed by many more of us.