2016: The Republicans Write
The salient basic numbers are these. Since 1979, compensation for the top 1 percent has grown 138 percent, while median wages have increased just 6.1 percent. Worker productivity has grown 63.5 percent in this time, and if wages had kept pace with productivity, the annual median wage today, instead of being around $35,300, would be $54,400.
.. Rhetorically, Bush tries to sound more like his realist, cautious father. But the substance of his policy positions puts him closer to George W. (the phrase “take them out” when applied to the Islamic State can mean only a ground war, although he’s not likely to admit to that). And he is surrounding himself with some of his brother’s key advisers—most surprisingly Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual architect of the disastrous Iraq intervention.
.. She probably accepts the standard set of reasons that economists offer about why this has happened—globalization, technological change, immigration patterns, a decrease in workers’ bargaining power, the rise in high-end compensation, and various federal tax and wage policies. And finally, she probably accepts that the solutions to the problem are chiefly economic solutions—changing tax policy, giving workers greater “voice,” taking steps to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization, and so on.
.. Even when Republicans acknowledge the wage problem, they don’t see it as resulting from chiefly economic factors. To them, the main culprits are moral decay and culture, notably the decline of the two-parent family ..
.. let’s make no mistake about it—the greatest threat to the average American’s achieving his dream today is a dysfunctional culture.
.. Like Bush, Santorum is working off the same script, to some extent, as the so-called “Reformicons,” the conservative pundits and intellectuals who have been trying to push the GOP to take middle-class economics seriously (a quote from Reformicon Ross Douthat of The New York Times appears on the back of Santorum’s book).
.. A favorite Ryan dyad of recent vintage was “makers and takers,” his phrase to describe those who contribute to society and those who take advantage of federal largesse. He seemed happy about this slogan. But then one day in 2012, a man challenged him: Who are these takers you speak of? “Is it the person who lost their job and is on unemployment benefits? Is it the veteran who served in Iraq and gets their medical care through the VA?”
.. The tone belies the radical nature of his views, which he tries to conceal in these pages but which erupt every so often. He appears to believe, for example, that people who pay no net federal tax—that’s nearly half the country, the famous 47 percent—should not have the right of the franchise: “Serious problems arise when a person who pays nothing has the right to vote and determine what other people are paying.”
.. The book is full of applause lines (“The IRS is a criminal enterprise”).