KRUGMAN! 'The American right is Still living in 1970s, or actually a Reaganite Fantasy Of The 1970s'

[kpete]

But that was a long time ago. These days crime is way down, so is teenage pregnancy, and so on; society did not collapse. What collapsed instead is economic opportunity. If progress against poverty has been disappointing over the past half century, the reason is not the decline of the family but the rise of extreme inequality. We’re a much richer nation than we were in 1964, but little if any of that increased wealth has trickled down to workers in the bottom half of the income distribution.

The trouble is that the American right is still living in the 1970s, or actually a Reaganite fantasy of the 1970s; its notion of an anti-poverty agenda is still all about getting those layabouts to go to work and stop living off welfare. The reality that lower-end jobs, even if you can get one, don’t pay enough to lift you out of poverty just hasn’t sunk in. And the idea of helping the poor by actually helping them remains anathema.

Will it ever be possible to move this debate away from welfare queens and all that? I don’t know. But for now, the key to understanding poverty arguments is that the main cause of persistent poverty now is high inequality of market income — but that the right can’t bring itself to acknowledge that reality.

..........

MORE:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/on-fighting-the-last-war-on-poverty/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=0

[wilt the stilt]

1. Nailed it

It's funny everything the right says about Dems is really about them. For istance Limbaugh said that when the dem's lose power they go nuts. Actually, we became very disciplined and won. They in turn when they lost power went nuts.
They accuse us of hero worship and that we consider Obama our savior but look at the Repub's Reagan is a god as well as people like Limbaugh. they are entirely personality driven and cultish.

[MynameisBlarney]

2. The 70's?

I'd say that is being too generous.
Unless he means the 1870's.

[ProSense]

3. Kick! n/t

[Enthusiast]

4. This post deserves hundreds of recommendations!

[IDemo]

5. I was thinking more like 1952

Or on second thought, 1052.

[JHB]

6. Kind of gratifying that Krugman agrees with me...

Today I discovered that Grover Norquist agrees with me about something...
Mon Nov 26, 2012, 09:02 PM

It's a conservative meme that liberals are stuck in 1968. The conservative bomb of a movie "An American Carol" had a whole musical number about it complete with choreographed tie-dyed, sandal-wearing, long-gray-haired university professors.

My counter has been that if you're going to reduce it to something dopey like that, then conservatives are stuck in 1978 (give or take a year): taxes are high, the economy is stagnant, crime is high and going up, looting of stores in the blackout and "the Bronx is burning" are still fresh in everyone's minds, Team B confirmed (for conservatives) that the Soviets were just chomping at the bit for world conquest (invading Afghanistan, overthrowing the legitimately-inherited dictatorship in Nicaragua, yadayadayada), every union is just like the mob-controlled Teamsters (and strict union rules cripple business), regulation is too tight, etc. etc. etc. Everything from views that were reasonable for that time to complete paranoid delusions were set in stone (and embossed with Ronald Reagan's profile).

Back to Norquist: from a 2009 "First Person Singular" column in the Washington Post:

When I became 21, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of 21. Look at people who grew up in the Great Depression, and their understanding of politics is Hoover and FDR. Fifty years later, everything is Hoover and FDR.

And when was it that Norquist turned 21? Why, in 1977, of course.

Thank you, Grover, for being so intellectually stunted as to prove my point with your own.

And let's not forget to add: by his very words, Norquist is obsolete and should be put out to pasture.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021886942