The elites have led the way: Permission granted to be irresponsible
By Tom Toles
Editorial cartoonist
February 1 at 9:23 AM

It is more than a little ironic to see progressive ideas being subjected to the test of whether they are responsible. Where does the idea come from that responsibility is a standard anymore?

Elites — and I define those as the wealthy, the leaders of corporations, government, think tanks, universities and the media — enjoy their positions and privileges to set the ethical standards for a society and to guide the direction a society moves in. So how have they been doing?
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Last I saw, the federal government gave stupendously MORE in tax cuts to the rich. How was this funded? It wasn’t! It was written entirely in red ink! Oh, yeah, the deficit. Which has been another area of endless empty lecturing from the elites. And yet there is always room for more tax cuts for the rich.

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But suddenly, it’s: Is Medicare-for-all RESPONSIBLE? Are higher marginal tax rates RISKY? Is a Green New Deal properly DETAILED? Mightn’t there be costs or TRADE-OFFS? And — again, for progressives only — what about the DEFICIT? These progressive proposals aren’t irresponsible. They are aimed at undoing prior irresponsibility. If we are going to use responsibility as a standard, let’s let the current swath of leaders back things up, reduce the vast inequality they have allowed and institute their own program of carbon reduction, and then we’ll resume the discussion about responsibility.
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Why is anyone astonished by the resurgence of the left?
By Tom Toles
January 31, 2019 at 10:08 AM

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We are at the end of the conservative revolution because the accumulated wealth disparity they never promised, but surely delivered, is now so pronounced that everybody sees it. And the new ultra-rich simply cannot bring themselves to help correct the imbalance. They are so besotted with their personal net worth and wealth-ranking that they are paralyzed in their death grip on their money. The death grip that is the death knell of their appeal.

Regular Americans, whether they are moderately well-off or really struggling, are working their heads off to just stay afloat and no longer see any realistic prospect that the “EVERYBODY gets rich!” implied promise of laissez-faire capitalism is ever going to deliver for them.

In addition to the shared-prosperity fail of the conservative project comes another market fail of even more monstrous proportions: the unwillingness of energy producers or users to take responsibility for their externalities of carbon pollution. The market purists have been content to decree that loading carbon dioxide into the atmosphere should be booked as “free.” Nobody had to pay, except future citizens. And no cost piled onto them, including death by fire or drowning, was considered an excessively high price for them to pay. Like the mountains of plastic garbage clogging the oceans, the costs of produce-and-dump-onto-somebody-else is an economic system that people are eventually going to become fed up with.

The way the conservative movement chose to deal with the mounting contradictions between promise and outcome has not been to moderate their ambitions or agenda. It has been to lie and discredit facts and science. Their most recent policy “triumph” has been to cut taxes on the rich AGAIN, with the same promises that everybody now KNOWS are fictitious. The result has been MORE money for the rich, LARGER deficits and no accountability. Never accountability. The other way they have managed to hold their dishonesty-riddled movement together is by doubling down on racial and ethnic animosity. Great plan. Thanks.
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