That's the title of this NY Times op-ed by Jeffery D. Sachs. His thesis is that the Occupy movement is the starting point for a new progressive era and that the 30-year-old Reagan Revolution, a sort of second Gilded Age characterized by gross income inequality and real cuts in "discretionary" government spending, is coming to an end. Here's an exceprt:
We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent. ... Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” ... Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time. [Editor's addition: If you thought that Democratic Administrations took a different approach you would be wrong. In fact,] Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.
CL&P Blog readers are referred to last Thursday's post on Ralph Nader's new book on corporatism, which, among other things, serves as a reminder that corporations are chartered by government to serve the public not harm it.
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