electronic
naif
The Status Quo
is NOT
Acceptable.
The New Deal helped lead the way out of the depression in the 1930s. Public works instilled a shared sense of responsibility and a feeling of country for all.
There is a distinction between parties in the United States though both spend more time on re-election than on developing policies. One party has spent decades working to roll back any legislation to regulate making a profit.
Portraying government as ineffective lead by Conservative and Libertarian think tanks has created a culture where lobbyists help craft law in favor of business.
Increased inequality, a reduction of the social services and a degradation of our environment have been a result of deregulation and tax cuts of the last thirty years
In 1952, turning Dwight Eisenhower launched the “Middle Way”, his version of the New Deal. The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government’s purview.
Eisenhower’s policies extended some opportunities to people of color, and race gave the Taft Republicans a wedge against the activist state. Equality of opportunity for African Americans could only be achieved through the use of state power, and that would cost tax dollars. Equal rights, Taft Republicans insisted, simply redistributed wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving people of color.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all. The popularity of both Roosevelt and his agenda showed that Americans recognized that the government must rein in the runaway capitalism.
A group of reactionary Republicans with Ohio senator Robert Taft, a representative of small-town, traditional America maintained that the New Deal undermined liberty and snaked socialism into the nation. They hated government rules and laws that protected their workers, and the need for new taxes to pay for bureaucrats and welfare programs. Above all, they rejected the idea that workers should have a say equal to theirs in what the government did. They loathed the Wagner Act, which empowered workers to unionize and bargain collectively.
Reagan announced in his inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. His administration began destroying the New Deal state and slashing taxes. The process accelerated when the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, purged Eisenhower Republicans and replaced legislative aides with lobbyists.
Movement conservatives have always known their program appealed to only a minority of Americans, and from the start they have worked to pack the courts with allies. Reagan named more than 375 federal judges, and President Trump has concentrated on filling judicial vacancies.
The U. S. Chamber of Commerce organized the resistance to the Great Society in the 1970’s that helped elect Ronald Reagan. Milton Friedman’s Doctrine that a company's only social responsibility is to increase profits for the owners (stockholders) changed the way business regarded the stakeholders.
Heaviest of all are the indirect burdens — the regulations, taxes, and expenses inflicted on employers that inevitably are passed on, in some measure, to employees, and particularly to those employees without the in-demand skills that put them in a stronger negotiating position. While on paper our taxes and regulations are targeted precisely, the economic fact is that those burdens are borne collectively, with costs shifted throughout the economy. The National Review
Burdens might be borne collectively but profits are not. Productivity increases go to the shareholder with little share to the worker and none to the commons.
Regulations were portrayed as a detriment to businesses, a cost to their profits. Welfare recipients were cast as lazy takers even as services are reduced.
Deregulation has lead to lack of environmental protection and in the Energy and Financial industries outright fraud. For corporations, fines are paid with no admission of responsibility.
For the poor, there is a prison industry.
From Manuel Castells, we are at a point where "the state's interactions with it's citizenry is reduced to election periods, largely shaped by political marketing and special interest groups, characterized by choice within a narrow spectrum of political option."
New Deal text - Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College