Voter ID Laws: The Red Herring of the Red States

Robbie Wilson

In the wake of recent violence and protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, the national spotlight has once again focused on the inhibition of constitutional rights, especially of those within the African-American community. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 celebrated it’s 50^th anniversary just last month, it would seem that America still has a long way to go to bridge the divide between minorities and a system that seems to favor “white privilege.” In the past month in Ferguson, we have witnessed the suppression of citizen’s First Amendment right to protest and their right to free speech; we have seen a complete disregard for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guaranteed application of due process under the law; arguably, we have also seen the misapplication of the Second Amendment, as no “well regulated militia” should ever be considered above the rule of law. However, these are not the only examples of how the constitutional rights of many Americans are suppressed today. 144 years after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the government from denying a citizen’s right to vote on the basis of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” we are in the midst of a systematic nullification of minority voter’s rights in America.

Republican lawmakers, in recent years, have asserted that restrictive voter ID laws are necessary in order to prevent what they allege to be an epidemic of unbridled voter fraud across the nation. Despite the rash of academic and statistical analysis disproving this so-called outbreak of rampant voter fraud, state legislatures in 34 states, largely controlled by the GOP, have passed laws mandating that voters show some form of identification before they are allowed to cast their ballots. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of this May only 31 of these states still have voter ID laws currently in place. They noted in their recent report that: “Pennsylvania’s law has been struck down and will not be appealed; Wisconsin’s law has been struck down and may be appealed; and North Carolina’s law, enacted in 2013, goes into effect in 2016.” My home state of Arkansas has enacted a strict photo voter ID law, which was struck down by a lower state court in April. Subsequently, the Arkansas Supreme Court rendered a stay on that ruling. The law was still in effect as of our primary election held on May 20^th, but it remains unclear if the case will be resolved before the coming Congressional Election on November 4^th.

Republicans, as well as the Conservatives on the Supreme Court, may jeer at the notion that these kinds of laws were, in fact, meant to unreasonably disenfranchise minorities, young voters, older voters, and poor voters until the proverbial “cows come home,” but studies have proven that it is the cruel reality surrounding these new voter ID laws. It may be true that some lawmakers have rationalized the implementation of such harsh limiting factors on voters out of fear that election results somehow lack integrity, but as I pointed out earlier there is a substantial consensus among constitutional scholars and legal experts that in-person voter fraud is extremely rare—by that I mean it’s virtually non-existent. Still, many Republican lawmakers insist that voter fraud is a problem and that their efforts are in no way designed to keep members of certain demographic groups, who typically vote for Democrats, away from the polls. With all this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what some researchers, legal experts, and others in the government have found or what they have to say regarding voter fraud and the recent push by many states to curtail it with these strict voter ID laws.

In an extensive research project entitled The Politics of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite, Ph.D., a professor of Political Science at Columbia University, notes that there is a clear distinction between election fraud and voter fraud. She defines voter fraud as the “intentional corruption of the electoral process by the voter,” which is not the same as when a collective or group, from election officials to political party affiliates, engages in fraudulent election activity on a broader scale. This distinction is very relevant to the debate because the sudden increase of voter ID laws are primarily aimed at putting an end to in-person voter fraud, hence the rationale behind the many states requiring voters to show a government issued photo ID before voting. Interestingly enough, her findings also show that voter fraud on the individual level is a tremendous rarity. “At the federal level, records show that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of voter fraud, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings, while not definitive, is also negligible.”

Another fascinating discovery of Minnite’s research is that although voter fraud is “exceedingly rare,” many of the hypothetically valid cases often turn out to be false claims after a candidate or the candidate’s supporters “cry foul” merely because they suffered defeat in the election. She writes in her report, “…a review of news stories over a recent two year period found that reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of the race, mischief and administrative or voter error.” Essentially, it is not necessarily the perceived purity of the election process that drives this push for stringent voter ID laws, but rather it stems from the intense desire to manipulate the process in such a way that their favored candidate wins. This “sore loser” concept—also echoed in research by Justin Levitt of the Loyola University Law School—seems to jive well with the assertion many Democrats have been making all along: Republican controlled state legislatures are attempting to systematically rig elections in order to keep groups who typically vote for Democrats out of the voting booth. Clearly the GOP, struggling to remain relevant with such voting blocs as African-Americans, Latinos, the poor, college students, and recent college graduates—just to name a few—has the motive and would very likely find a great deal of perverse pleasure in eliminating as many of these votes as possible, especially considering their latest nefarious endeavors to gerrymander districts in Florida and Texas, among a plethora of other states, to favor Republican candidates.

Earlier this month, Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the topic of the racial strains that continue to plague America, many of which the conservative, male dominated SCOTUS has largely ignored in recent years. Justice Ginsburg spoke about how the “real racial problem” in the United States will doubtfully improve if the way in which whites and “people of color” coexist “remains divided.” The 81 year-old justice alluded to a time in the 1970s when the Supreme Court, then headed by Chief Justice Warren Burger, forged a sensible understanding of the “disparate impact” of laws that affect minority groups in a disproportionate manner. In 1971 the “Burger Court” issued a unanimous ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which supported the busing of black students into predominately white school districts in order to end what many considered to be “de facto” racial segregation. “It was a very influential decision and it was picked up in England,” noted Ginsburg. “That’s where the court was headed in the 70s.”

It would seem that the course of SCOTUS had turned opposite by 2013, as the “Roberts Court” removed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through it’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. In a 5-4 decision, they ruled that Section 4(b), which contains the coverage formula determining which jurisdictions are subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting, was unconstitutional. Now, states would no longer be required to seek preclearance, meaning prior approval, from the Department of Justice in order to change their voting laws. This was a major victory for opportunists who seek to manipulate voting requirements in such a way that discourages certain groups of citizens from voting. It is unmistakably a far cry from the Supreme Court that Justice Ginsburg had previously described, a SCOTUS that was “once a leader in the world at rooting out racial injustice.” Indeed, the 2013 ruling inspired Texas, North Carolina, and Alabama, as well as a host of others, to adopt laws almost immediately that allowed for the cartographic redistricting and the implementation of restrictive voter ID laws, seemingly aimed at keeping minority voters from effectively participating in our electoral system. What is so frustrating for many of us on the left is that all of this has been done under the guise of protecting our country from fraudulent voting, which Dr. Minnite discovered in her research was not a viable threat.

Another interesting bit of investigation, perhaps even the most telling of current voter fraud research, comes from Justin Levitt, a constitutional and democratic law expert, from the Loyola University Law School. Throughout the course of the study, he probed primary, general, special, and municipal elections from the years 2000 to 2014, reporting that in “…general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.” This comprehensive study was designed to “…track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.” Levitt found only 31 instances out of the aforementioned 1 billion ballots cast across the country—including the instances involving multiple ballots—in which strict voter ID laws might have prevented in-person voter fraud.

Dr. Levitt concluded:

“Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed…with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.”

He went on to say:

“Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.”

Although I was not at all surprised to find that instances of in-person voter fraud were practically nil, I must admit that I was astounded at the sheer volume of research that has been conducted regarding the efficacy of strict voter ID laws in relation to the prevention of fraudulent activity at the polls. How can any Republican continue to allege with a straight face that voter fraud is some terrible blight upon our republic in light of all of this evidence to the contrary? That’s easy—because they know it isn’t a real problem. In the words of Don Yelton, a former GOP leader in North Carolina, who said in an interview last year with Daily Show correspondent, Aasif Mandvi:

“The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids too lazy to get up off their ‘bohonkas’ and go get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of whites, so be it.”

Later in the interview, he elaborated further:

“If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

Yelton, who was forced to step down shortly after he made his racially insensitive remarks, is not the only Republican boss at the state level to weigh in on the issue. The GOP leader of Pennsylvania’s state House, Mike Turzai, suffered from a bit of foot-in-mouth syndrome when he listed voter ID laws on his program of Republican political victories for 2012:

“Voter ID, which is ‘gonna’ allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

Can someone please tell us again how these strict voter ID laws are not intended to disenfranchise certain voters who tend to poll Democratic? As we can clearly see from these examples, GOP leaders are not afraid to tell us that they were designed to do just that.

The Republicans are aware that there are thousands of people in our country who either do not have or cannot afford to procure a copy of their birth certificate. In some case, especially with the elderly or with recent immigrants, a certificate of live birth may never have been issued. Sometimes records get destroyed or cannot be found. Some people in larger cites do not have a valid driver’s license because they depend on public transportation and do not own a car. Some people cannot even afford to purchase a state issued ID card because they would rather buy groceries. We must venture to keep in mind that not everyone has the same access to all the same amenities as everyone else. But, that most certainly doesn’t render them any less of a citizen and it should never preclude them from voting. In remarks to the NAACP in Houston a few years ago, Attorney General Eric Holder rightly referenced the Twenty-fourth Amendment:

“Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them – and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes.”

For those of you who are not too familiar with the Constitution, the Twenty-fourth Amendment, adopted in 1964, made that variety of a taxation illegal.

While all of us can agree that we aspire to uphold the integrity of our electoral process, after reviewing the facts, we can safely say that there is no substantial proof of a voter fraud problem in America. However, there is plenty of evidence that Republican posturing for political gains has played a huge roll in bringing these unnecessary—dare I say morally repugnant—voter ID laws into fruition. There is also plenty data that indicates a concentrated effort on the part of the GOP to rig our electoral system through the gerrymandering of districts as well as by attempting to deprive certain citizens of their right to vote; a privilege that many hold sacrosanct in our country. Republicans, as per usual, are once again on the wrong side of history when it comes to standing up for the rights of the underprivileged and minorities in America. Through their cleverly devised schemes, the GOP has utilized smoke and mirror tactics to confuse the American public into thinking that in-person voter fraud is actually a major problem that we face as a nation, when in reality what they are doing is purposefully disenfranchising minority groups. Once again, the most comprehensive research available has proven that the odds of in-person voter fraud are an infinitesimal 31-in-a-billion. Therefore, I can logically conclude, as I hope you can, dear reader, that the Republican rationale behind the recent outbreak of voter ID laws is truly fallacious. By their own admission the laws are racist and intended to marginalize a huge bloc of Democratic voters. Without a shred of doubt, we can conclude that voter ID laws are the red herring of the red states.

The Contradictions of Being Conservative

Robbie Wilson

 

As we approach November 4th—a mere 91 days from the time my fingers danced across the keyboard to produce this blog—one idea continues to marinate in the juices of my liberal mind. It is a thought that I’m sure many of us have had in some shape or form, especially as we are entering into the home stretch of the upcoming midterm elections. This notion that so pervades my thought process is rather simple: the modern-day conservative movement is the epitome of a walking contradiction. By no means, dear reader, is the following catalogue of right-wing incongruities comprehensive, but they are profoundly important to note and demand our utmost attention before we make our stand in November.

 

If you or I were to ask the average, everyday Republican we might meet walking down the street how they feel about the size of our government, the overwhelming response would undoubtedly be that big government is the worst conceivable evil known to America. However, their beliefs are only skin deep. The fact of the matter is that conservatives, by and large, feel this way only if they are not referring to the intrusive legislation of an individual’s morality, the doling out of huge government subsidies to “big business,” or when waging military operations all across the world. Without going into too much detail, my assertions can easily be proven by taking a look at the voting trends of Republican lawmakers. Consequently, it would seem that for many conservatives, “big guv’mint” is a terrible vice only when it is promoting social equality, social safety net programs, disaster relief aid, immigration reform, public education, workplace safety, and protection of the environment. With regard to these things, their attitudes invariably gravitate towards defunding them.

 

Of course, the inherent contradiction here is that conservatives are just fine with a large government as long as it’s engaged in nation building, slashing tax rates for the rich, forcing women to remain pregnant at all costs, not to mention when it’s bankrolling all those costly corporate subsidies. Did I mention Republicans are fine with governmental overreach when trying to enforce strict voter ID laws, but hate it when any proposal is made to tighten ID restrictions on citizens who try to buy a gun? The past presidential election, like many others in recent memory, was rife with right-wing propaganda that “big government” is the problem. But, let’s be clear about who the real “enemy” is: the affluent, backward-looking, “culture warriors” who consistently vilify those in government who challenge their unfettered attempts to become even richer, all while making this extra wealth upon the backs of ordinary Americans, sometimes barely making enough money to survive. Federalism may not be ideal, yet a majority of voters sent a message in 2012, by re-electing President Obama, that they want Washington to protect them against the perils of predatory capitalism and corporate greed.

 

Good government must advance the public welfare of everyone, not just that of the Plutocrats, through providing public education, encouraging social justice, as well as helping families and small businesses to thrive. Either that or we misplace what remains of our country’s economic mobility, once thought to be unmatched by any other nation. Republicans wear their patriotism like a great badge of honor, but fail to see how they are contradicting themselves when they promote tax policies that encourage American companies to leave our shores. I agree with what Senator Elizabeth Warren has to say on the matter:

“They are taking advantage of all the good things that our government helps provide—educated workers, roads and bridges, a dependable court system, patent and copyright protections—and then running out on the bill.”

She has also astutely explained the ideal synergy that fruitful, productive relationships between businesses, communities, and government should generate:

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

 

As you likely already know, those in the GOP—self-proclaimed patriots, so-called stalwart defenders of the Constitution, and supposed protectors of the American way—are the greatest ally in our government for corporate deserters. I ask you, dear reader, how can anyone consider this to be in the least bit patriotic?

 

It seems to me that the conservative aversion to reality has finally come to the forefront of the political scene, which we can see with crystal clarity, as they blatantly reject irrefutable, verified facts. Although many Republicans foist upon us this idea of how honest they are, more often than not I have observed that they stop at nothing but to corrupt the truth. Additionally, many modern-day conservatives often make a concerted effort to propagate anti-intellectualism and project their ill-will onto the most respectable of scientists. For example, many conservatives think that those of us who acknowledge the existence of climate change are not simply mistaken or even misguided, but rather we are fools who have fallen prey to some elaborate hoax, invented by scheming scientists, in order to dupe us into believing that our use of fossil fuels and other pollutants is the culprit. The contradiction we see here is, despite the fact that many right-wingers shun the words of reputable climate change experts, they will soak up utterly anything that FOX, statistically the most unreliable source of news, produces.

 

I contend we have recognized for several years that there is something inherently strange, even paradoxical about conservatives in our country. From their inconsistencies about what defines a “big government;” from their perception of corporate “welfare” versus social safety net programs; from their sophomoric characterization of what it means to be patriotic; from their notions of what exactly constitutes a fact; from all of this we can safely surmise that they lack any solid vision of how to properly solve the plethora of problems currently facing our nation. The contradictions of being a conservative are myriad, dear reader, and we scarcely have time for such tomfoolery—we have too much work to do. Vote Blue in 2014.

 

The Myth of “Reaganomics” Is Busted

Robbie Wilson

 

By the time I was born in April of 1981, our country was feeling the effects of a decade of rising inflation and unemployment rates, both in full force at the beginning of the Reagan administration. After many years of wage and price controls in the 1970s, Reagan had perused the presidency with promises of promoting a rebirth of the free market system and to reduce the rising tide of deficit spending in the government, using the appealing and simplistic slogan: “It’s time to get government off our backs.” Although there are many who proclaim President Reagan’s economic policies were triumphant and should be considered the gold standard for our American system, I do not count myself among them. In fact, I contend that our current debt-ridden economy, a mere façade of it’s former greatness, once overflowing with pecuniary success and nearly unlimited potential for growth, is a direct result of Reagan’s implementation of “trickle-down” economics, or what many now refer to as “Reaganomics.”

 

In America’s current political scene, the Tea Party promotes a false narrative as to why and how the U.S. economy came to struggle through this epic, seemingly endless expansion of federal debt obligations, always quick to point blaming fingers at President Obama, a political tactic which seems to resonate loudly with the conservative base as well as some independent voters. Meanwhile, House Republicans attempt to recover favor in the court of public opinion after bungling last year’s debt ceiling negotiations, resulting in another government shutdown because of disagreements between the GOP leadership in Congress and the White House, not to mention their plethora of unsuccessful attempts to repeal or obstruct Obamacare despite its slowly growing popularity. However, there seems to be some turmoil in the conservative camp—many are shifting farther to the right and away from the more moderate GOP establishment—which could give the ultra-conservative Tea Party just the advantage they need this year to present an encore of their astonishing performance in the midterm election cycle of 2010. For many Americans, this Tea Party variety of conservatism is familiar, time-tested, and is rumored—only rumored, I said—to have worked for President Reagan, their archetype of what it means to be a right-wing political hero.

 

Frankly, I’m convinced of the dreadful possibility that a majority of voting Americans might once again swallow the Teabagger’s phony rhetoric. This would undoubtedly result in the rapid continuation of economic decline in America, which can be traced back to the inception and whole-hearted embrace of “Reaganomics.” The situation is already dire given the scarcity of jobs offering a livable wage, the ever-declining middle class, and the harsh atmosphere of social divisiveness, which seems to be the Tea Party’s calling card as well as their lifeblood. Our country, foundering like a ship at sea, has ventured into an unforgiving whirlpool, spiraling down into the dark abyss, yet there is still hope if Americans can start to comprehend the reasons for our economic decline, and then translate their newfound understanding into action by casting a well-informed vote in November.

 

First, we must all be cognizant of the fact that the present federal debt is just under $12 trillion greater than it was when George W. Bush assumed the presidency. During his tenure in office, the over-spending on failed, superfluous wars in conjunction with huge tax cuts, mostly favoring the very wealthy, efficiently burned through the budget surplus of $236 billion that was left over from the last half of the Clinton administration. Additionally, the deficit was on a descending trajectory after President Clinton’s two terms, which would have potentially eliminated the national debt completely over the decade that was to follow. Around the same time that George W. Bush was inaugurated, then Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, revealed to a Senate committee in January of 2001 that the government was paying the debt too quickly. Evidently, he had started to worry about the Fed’s ability to influence interest rates should the government nearly or completely pay off the debt, because the eventual outcome would be no more debt obligations to peddle to investors both at home and abroad—fundamentally the basis of the Fed’s power to control interest rates and to print more money.

 

It should come as no surprise that Greenspan, widely-known as a student of Ayn Rand and a Reagan appointee, rendered his stamp of approval to Bush’s arrangement for colossal tax cuts, largely reminiscent of the plan Reagan had conceived nearly two decades before, aimed mostly at benefitting the extraordinarily rich and their many corporate interests. This approach to government spending, about which there is nothing fiscally conservative, was absolutely the perfect plan to avoid paying off the national debt, a prospect which had so vexed Chairman Greenspan. The economic policies of Bush and the GOP during the early to mid 2000s effectively doomed the debt to balloon to a magnitude never before seen. When Bush-43 left office in the midst of a tanking Wall Street, the likes of which had not been experienced since the Great Depression, and exceptionally lax lending regulations, I began to realize that our political discourse had almost totally shifted away from paying off the national debt, as if it were now some preposterous delusion. Undeniably, the debt had exploded to almost $11 trillion under “W” and was moving swiftly higher, as the nation scrambled to prevent a fiscal disaster that could very well have ushered in an era of endless recession.

 

While there is plenty of blame to go around, we did not arrive at our current economic state because of the actions of Bush-43, our current “do-nothing” Congress, or even President Obama. As I mentioned before, we can attribute these problems to Reagan, the actor and former governor of California, who had fully embraced this new notion called “supply-side” economics. He campaigned on the idea that if we “get the government off our backs,” remove regulations from corporations, and merely let the wealthy use their money, power, and knowledge in a completely unfettered economy, all of us would eventually profit. Lower tax rates, fewer corporate regulations, as well as other measures, such as free trade agreements, were supposed to result in higher profit margins. All of this was supposed to trickle down later from the wealthiest earners, moving throughout the whole economy, eventually reaching those at the bottom.

 

In reality, Reagan’s tax cuts facilitated the rampant growth of our federal debt, which was approximately $934 billion at the time he was sworn in as president. When he left office in January of 1989, the debt had tripled to $2.7 trillion. Sadly, the precedent of gross over-spending in tandem with low tax rates, especially at the top, were carried on throughout the next administration under George H.W. Bush. When Bush-41 departed from the White House in January of 1993, the national debt was a whopping $4.2 trillion, which translates into four times the amount the debt had been at the end of President Carter’s term. It wouldn’t be until 1993 that a new Democratic administration, under President Bill Clinton, began pushing through tax increases, which would partially reverse the damage inflicted by the massive tax cuts Reagan had implemented.

 

Eventually, the deficit problem began to stabilize, with the total debt standing at $5.7 trillion and heading downward as President Clinton departed from office in January of 2001. When he left the Oval Office, he gave us a budget surplus and a plan to continue this trend of frugality over the next ten years. The outcome many of us expected was that through responsible taxing and spending, the excess $5.6 trillion in government funds would be used to pay down the national debt during the following decade. As I mentioned before, it was this notion of paying off the debt too quickly that spooked the Fed. Evidently, it was important enough that Chairman Greenspan decided to support George W. Bush’s new round of tax cuts, which were aimed primarily at the wealthy. Essentially, we had another dose of “voodoo economics” as soon as Bush-43 took office. Of course, the end result of George W. Bush’s version of “Reaganomics” was an astounding $10.6 trillion national debt as his presidency came to a close.

 

I cannot help but to point out how ironic it is that so many of the Republican leaders, those who were yelling and screaming the loudest during last year’s budget standoff—including Speaker of the House Boehner—were the most ardent supporters of the Bush era tax cuts, our expensive incursion into Iraq, as well as some very drastic bank deregulation policies. Essentially, they were falsely critical of President Obama about the debt crisis because they were, in fact, its key orchestrators. The GOP controlled House will only bring to a vote those fiscal policies that promote “supply-side,” “free-trade,” and deregulatory strategies, which have actually been proven over time to have the opposite effect on the economy than what their conservative champion, Reagan, had predicted some three decades before.

 

Over these past 30 years, “Reaganomics” has proven itself to be detrimental to our country’s capacity to generate decent pay for workers and incapable of providing the upward fiscal mobility required to sustain a growing middle class, which has traditionally been the backbone of our American economy since the end of World War II. Many Americans are beginning to notice how too much “free trade” can act as the primary ingredient to de-industrializing a society, which has presently been linked to the slump in the growth of manufacturing jobs in America. It should come as no surprise to any of us that the titans of industry are never too shy to outsource labor in the name of creating higher profits, regardless of the long-term effects these practices have had on our economy. Despite the many who say the “stagflation” of the 1970s was horrific, the job market experienced growth of about 26 percent overall for the decade. Ironically, the conservative reaction to “stagflation” yielded 6 percent less than that. Our country experienced just a 20 percent boost to job creation during the 1980s, when “Reaganomics” was first introduced, which continued well into the 1990s. President Clinton was able to temper the effects of “Reaganomics” by pushing through tax increases, although he continued to promote an agenda of relaxing trade regulations and additional “free trade” agreements.

 

What I find so terrifying about our current political state is that no matter how unsuccessful “Reaganomics” has shown itself to be over the past 30 years, many voters, especially those of the Tea Party ilk, still continue to rally in support of these failed ideas. All the Republican presidents we’ve had since Ronald Reagan have continued his legacy of unsuccessful economic policies, despite the fact that over the last ten years or so—now that “Reaganomics” has had ample time to marinate—the average net worth of American households has fallen almost five percent when adjusted to inflation. Incidentally, even during the so-called economic malaise period of the 1970s, household net incomes in the United States were rising—rising, I said—in the double digits on average. Even still, the Tea Party movement and many other Republicans would have us continue merrily along the “trickle-down” path. It is no secret that they have shot down practically every attempt President Obama and the Democrats have made to reform the tax code, banking regulations, corporate and trade regulations, and to increase taxes on the wealthy, not to mention blocking any legislation having to do with promoting workers’ rights, equal pay for women, or raising the minimum wage.

 

I will argue that all an American voter needs to do is step back and take a really long, hard look at our current economic situation. Almost all of the nation’s wealth has certainly traveled to the top as intended by “Reaganomics,” but it failed to trickle back down. Instead, all that extra capital, saved from tax cuts and generated through Uncle Sam’s subsidies, was sent overseas either to avoid monetary repatriation (a common tax dodge) or through the outsourcing of labor, which is cheaper and the profits are harder to tax. Our government has wasted trillions of dollars—money we have had to borrow—on foreign wars over natural resources, while doling out even more money over the years to banks and corporations in the form of bailouts, which is oftentimes misappropriated by the issuance of gigantic bonus checks for executives. It is time, therefore, for American voters to stop denying the obvious truths about this flawed Republican approach to building an economy. We can do this very easily by sending a clear message at the polls this November. We truly do have the power to change how we do business, a power realized only through the casting of our ballots. The past three decades we’ve spent under the looming shadow of “Reaganomics” has only yielded a widening gap between the top and the bottom earners of our economy, with the middle class rapidly collapsing into non-existence. It has obviously not brought forth the golden age of economic prosperity that Ronald Reagan so convincingly described. Indeed, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; nothing trickles down. That’s the sad reality in which we live today. The myth of “Reaganomics” has been busted.