History Repeats Itself (Unnecessarily)

In the 2010 elections the Republicans were able to corral enough votes in the right places to retake the House of Representatives.   But they blew their opportunity to also take the Senate by running some candidates so far to the right that they scared voters, so the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats.   Since the election the Republicans have taken every possible opportunity to claim they were given a mandate by the voters.

I can't count the number of times in the last month, while watching C-SPAN (yes, I'm a political nerd), that I've seen Republican politicians get up on the floor of both the House and Senate and claim the election showed the people want the policies the Republicans are trying to sell (which still look and sound like the same Reagan-Bush policies that got this country into the current economic mess).

The American people know that the trickle-down economic policies failed and brought us to this recession.   But they also know that the timid policies of the Democrats have done nothing to cure those economic ills.   I think they're pretty disgusted with both parties right now.   They want someone -- anyone -- to get busy creating jobs and lowering the deficit.

Sadly, they're not going to get that in the next couple of years.   The Republicans think the answer is to give more money to the rich (the Hoover solution) while the Democrats are too scared to spend enough money to create real and sustained job creation (and with the House in Republican hands, they have probably blown that opportunity anyway).

The sad fact is that the recession was caused by the massive concentration of the nation's wealth and income in the hands of too few people (the top few percent of the richest Americans), while most other Americans see their wages stagnated (giving them less buying power each year) or their jobs disappear altogether (as companies continue to downsize and outsource good American jobs).

In the 1920's the Republicans, under Coolidge and Hoover, convinced voters that all that was needed was tax cuts for the rich and deficit cuts for the country.   They claimed the deficit cuts would create a healthier economy and the tax cuts would spur job creation.   Neither happened.   Instead the country was thrown into its worst depression -- a depression that the country eventually had to spend its way out of (with large deficits, which were  eventually paid down through job creation and higher taxes, especially on the rich).

But it seems like people are doomed to learn the same hard lessons over again after only a few generations, because history is now repeating itself.   Starting with the Reagan administration in the early 1980's, Republicans began convincing people again of the old myth that anyone can get rich in this country.   This was reinforced by the good fortune of some computer geeks (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.) and Wall Street insiders, just like it was a century before by the corporate robber barons.

Once again people were convinced that all that was needed was to remove the regulations put in place after the Great Depression and they could get rich like the fortunate few.   And its working just as well as it did before.   The ultra-rich control over 50% of the wealth and income of the country while everyone else fights over the crumbs that are left.   The country has slid into a serious recession that is fast turning into another depression.

And the voters have again bought into the same old Coolidge-Hoover policies, still being pushed by the Republicans, of cutting taxes for the rich and cutting the deficit for the country.   These policies didn't work in the 1920's, and there's no reason to believe they'll work any better in the 21st Century, especially since we now have job outsourcing added to the equation (which was not a problem in the 1920's).   These policies will just push this country deeper into an economic quagmire.

The real unemployment and underemployment figure is around 17% currently, not far from the 20+% figures of the Great Depression, and there's no real reason to believe it won't get even worse.   And it will get worse because of two things -- Republican trickle-down policies and Democratic timidity (political cowardice).

I wish the American people had learned the hard lessons taught by the Great Depression, but if they did they have now forgotten them.   It looks like it will require another nearly total collapse of our economy to wake people up.   Perhaps then the country will be ready to return to the progressive policies that pulled us out of the Great Depression and created the economic good times of the 1950's and 1960's (and to a slightly lesser extent the 1970's).

Until then we'll just have to suffer.   Because we're too stupid to learn from the past.