Nothin' But Good Times Ahead by Molly Ivins

Author:Molly Ivins [Ivins, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-43447-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

GOP SEEMS TO VALUE UGLY BUT TRADITIONAL TACTIC OF US VS. THEM

In the face of increasingly bad economic news, Bush and the Republicans have increasingly pitched the re-election campaign on “family values,” a nebulous phrase that the GOP hopes connotes a social permissiveness on the part of Democrats, especially the party’s support for homosexual rights.

—News story, Houston Chronicle, July 29

The Chronk’s analysis is conventional wisdom already. The Republicans are going to run against gays. Last time out, they used Willie Horton and our fear of black criminals to take our minds off the Iran-contra scandal, the S&L crisis, the faltering economy, and the whole greedfest of the eighties.

This time it’s homosexuals, dying by the hundreds of thousands of a terrible disease, who get to be “Them.”

It seems to me the question here is not whether we approve of gay people, but what we make of a political party willing to whip up hatred against a minority group for partisan political gain. There is certainly a moral question involved.

This “social-issues” game has been going on since the late 1960s, when running against unpopular “life-styles,” specifically long-haired, dope-smoking kids, proved to be a big hit. Come to think of it, the game is a lot older than that. In the late nineteenth century, running against “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” was the code phrase for much-despised Catholic immigrants.

Old dog still hunts. Get people all excited about some perceived menace from an unpopular group and maybe they won’t notice the unemployment rate, maybe they’ll forget that the richest 1 percent of the people got sixty percent of the new wealth in the eighties, maybe they’ll overlook the exemptions carved out for the big donors to the Republican party by Dan Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness.

In an attempt to keep our collective eye on the shell with the pea under it, let’s take another look at Ross Perot’s deficit-reduction plan, with the help of Jamie Galbraith, the Texas economist (it runs in his family). The Texas Galbraith raises what is probably the most important question to be asked about Perot’s plan to balance the federal budget in five years: Is this really a right and proper goal?

Perot himself, before he dropped out of the race, predicted it would take twelve years to balance the budget and noted several times that it had to be done slowly and carefully in order not to hurt the economy. Because this is the fact of life: When you raise taxes and cut government spending, it slows economic growth.

Galbraith has run the numbers on the Perot plan, which is still short of details, and this is his conclusion:

I calculate that real economic growth, presently predicted at 3 percent each year, would fall below 2 percent by 1996, and virtually to zero by 1998. Unemployment would rise steadily, undermining the hoped-for expenditure savings. And with slower growth, the economy will be smaller every year than presently predicted, until by 1998 there would be a gap of just about $1 trillion below current

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