Under the Bush administration you could just feel the shifting of wealth into the pockets of the wealthy. It started from the very beginning with Bush’s tax cut in 2001. This tax measure lopped off taxes primarily on the very wealthy and the result was an exponential increase in the amount of wealth at the very top of the economic spectrum. The middle class was being squeezed. Despite the wealth being funneled upward, businesses were reducing pensions and raises. Workers’ wages were not running parallel with the increase in inflation. The costs of health care were skyrocketing. The recent economic downturn was simply the heaviest strike from a succession of blows exacerbated by a failed right wing economic policy. In so many ways the 2000s were the faux Gilded Age.
The original Gilded Age occurred in the last half of the 19th century and was fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution. The Gilded Age saw America surge past the great powers of Europe in industrial might. But there were many victims. Child labor, women workers, and new immigrants from Europe’s underbelly and East Asia offered a cheap workforce. Labor laws favored the employers. Sixty hour weeks were not uncommon in factories that held all the brutalities the late 1800s had to offer. This was the era of the Robber Barons of industry. Huge icons of American business ran monopolies in steel, railroads, coal, oil and finance. Wealth, then too, was top heavy. The rich lived in opulence and the poor masses lived in tenements in America’s urban centers or eked out a living on farms. The Gilded Age was known for its corruption, both governmental and private.
The ills of the Gilded Age brought about a period of progressivism. The most famous of the political progressives was the Republican Teddy Roosevelt. Known as the “trust buster” Roosevelt inaugurated a period of fairness to the industrial sector. TR was also famous for his stance on conservation at a time when America’s forests were disappearing at an alarming rate and animals such as the bison were being hunted to near extinction. These progressives that were changing their world during the infancy of the 20th century were considered the pioneers of modern liberalism.
The current age is seeing a similar shift to the left. Government is again taking on the ills of the private sector. Only this time the weight of the nation’s (some would say the world’s) economy is in the balance. You would think by listening to the chorus being trumpeted from the right that what ails America is socialism. What ails America is the overextension of the capitalist powers that be. From delving out loans to those who could not afford them to issuing credit cards to risky users (with every incentive by the companies to snare the consumers in debt). The trading in commodities which created artificial bubbles and subsequent bursts became the name of the game; the last and greatest bubble and burst being the housing market.
For eight years the nation’s infrastructure was sacrificed by President Bush due to his attention to necessary (Afghanistan) and fallacious (Iraq) wars. The government, as a whole, allowed the private capitalist system and the public sector to go unchecked. (see AIG, Citi Group, Bernard Madoff, no bid contracts, Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae, etc…) What is a president to do under such an environment? Barack Obama is a progressive. The right wing may not like his attempt to usher in a period of government intervention but this is what he ran on and this is what he is doing. Letting the banking system collapse or turning one’s back on the car companies would seem wise in the short run but disastrous to the economy in the long run. (Let’s not forget President Bush and the Republicans passed a bill that offered a sizable tax deduction to companies that bought the biggest SUVs and trucks on the market. Not exactly a strategy that helped the long term business plan of the auto makers.) President Obama’s budget contained measures intended to right the wrongs of eight years of neglect, from providing incentives for energy alternatives to giving the middle class a significant tax deduction for their kids’ college education. There is no doubt the cost of this is painful but we are simply paying for the neglect and errors of laissez faire economics. The lesson here is if you don’t want full scale progressivism, sprinkle in a little oversight on your free market capitalism.
