President Barack Obama is a youthful, well educated son of an immigrant, and Republicans are clearly trying to get some of his magic to rub off on them, so they asked Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal-the youthful, well educated son of immigrants-to give the response to Obama's speech last night. Good idea to have a fresh face given the GOP brand is in such disrepair. The problem is that he gave the same old arguments Republicans and conservatives have been giving us for a very long time.
Republicans made those arguments the last eight years, saying that tax cuts and smaller government would lead to prosperity. The results were, well, shall we say, less than delightful.
They clearly made those arguments in the 1993 budget/economic package fight. As I recount in my book, The Progressive Revolution:
Typical of the hysterical Republican arguments against the economic plan was the one from Newt Gingrich, when he said, "The tax increase... will lead to a recession...and actually increase the deficit." Dick Armey, the then House Republican conference chairman, said that the "impact on job creation will be devastating." And Senator Bob Packwood even said he would bet his mortgage that the deficit, unemployment, and inflation would all go up as a result of Clinton's economic plan. If Packwood had bet his mortgage on that, he would have lost this house: all of those Republican predictions turned out to be 100 percent wrong.
Republicans also urged vehemently against the New Deal. Just as every Republican in the House and all but three in the Senate voted no on Obama's economic recovery plan, and just as every Republican in both houses voted no on Clinton's economic plan, Social Security, the minimum wage, and most of the rest of FDR's highly successful New Deal (and yes, contrary to conservatives' claims, the banking system recovered and unemployment dropped more than 60% in six years; the New Deal was a big success.) Conservative Republicans argued in the 1930s that ideas like Social Security and minimum wage would cause more unemployment, waste money, and that "business and industry are already operating under very heavy burdens." Does that sound familiar?
The fact is that conservatives from the beginning of our American experiment in the 1700's have argued against bold economic programs like Obama's that directly invest in jobs, education, and health care for working people. They have argued instead for giving more resources to big business and the wealthy-if we do that, they suggest, the benefits will eventually trickle down to the rest of us. That's why when Jindal's list of solutions were simply yet another list of tax cuts, mostly to business, and it sounded awfully familiar: the conservative Republican solution to every economic problem is more tax cuts targeted to wealthy corporations, along with that wonderful elixir of less regulation and smaller government. The problem is that these ideas just don't work. They have been wrong every time.
It doesn't matter that we are in the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis brought on by the same economic policies conservatives like Jindal are pushing. It doesn't matter that most economists think these kinds of tax cuts don't work to stimulate the economy. Conservatives just keep calling for the same policies over and over again: more tax cuts. Smaller government. And as Jindal did last night with his Katrina Story, they tell the same anecdotal stories about stupid bureaucrats (or welfare queens, or whatever) to make their hackneyed points about the dangers of government. I'd like to remind Gov Jindal that it was his party that ran the Katrina rescue operation so poorly in 2005. It's pretty sad for a political party when their best argument for their philosophy is their own government's incompetence.
So thanks, Gov Jindal, for offering a fresh face to conservative Republican policies. Too bad the ideas themselves are so incredibly stale.
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