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Michael Barone: Voters Want Growth, Not Income Redistribution
“A 2008 election widely regarded as heralding a shift toward the more government-friendly public sentiment of the New Deal and Great Society eras seems to have yielded just the reverse.”
So writes William Galston, Brookings Institution scholar and deputy domestic adviser in the Clinton White House, in the New Republic. Galston, one of the smartest political and policy analysts around, has strong evidence for this conclusion.
He cites a recent Gallup poll showing that while 82 percent of Americans think it’s extremely or very important to “grow and expand the economy” and 70 percent say it’s similarly important to “increase equality of opportunity for people to get ahead,” only 46 percent say it’s important to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor,” and 54 percent say this is only somewhat or not important.
In addition, by a 52 to 45 percent margin, Americans see the gap between the rich and the poor as an acceptable part of the economic system rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. In 1998, during the high-tech economic boom, Americans took the opposite view by the same margin.
As Galston notes, these findings suggest that President Barack Obama’s much-praised speech at Osawatomie, Kan., decrying inequality “may well reduce his chances of prevailing in a close race.” Class warfare politics, as I have noted, hasn’t produced a Democratic presidential victory in a long, long time.
Where Galston misses a step, I think, is that he seems to regard the move away from redistributionist politics in this time of economic stagnation as an anomaly in need of explanation. He seems to share the Obama Democrats’ assumption that economic distress would make Americans more supportive of, or amenable to, big government policies.
That, after all, is what we have all been taught by the great and widely read New Deal historians, and that lesson has been absorbed by generations of politicians and political pundits.
I believe that historians have taught the wrong lessons about the 1930s. And I believe there is a plausible and probably correct reason why economic distress has apparently moved Americans to be less rather than more supportive of big government.
To understand the lessons of the 1930s, you need to read the election returns. Franklin Roosevelt’s big victory in 1932 was a massive rejection of Republicans across the board. Republicans lost huge ground in urban and rural areas, in the West and Midwest and most of the East, even in their few redoubts in the South.
In 1936, FDR won re-election by a slightly larger margin, but with a different coalition. The rural and small town North returned to its long Republican allegiance, while Democrats made further big gains among immigrants and blue-collar workers in big cities and factory towns.
The New Deal historians attributed these gains to Roosevelt’s economic redistribution measures — high tax rates on high earners, the pro-union Wagner Act, Social Security. These laws — the so-called Second New Deal — were passed in 1935. They replaced the different, non-redistributionist policies of the First New Deal that stopped the deflationary downward spiral under way when Roosevelt took office.
The problem with the historians’ claims is that the shifts in the electorate apparent in 1936 also are apparent in the 1934 off-year elections. Democrats won big that year, but compared with 1932, they lost ground in rural areas and small towns and gained much ground in big cities and factory towns.
The 1936 realignment happened in 1934. It could not have been caused by redistributionist Second New Deal legislation because it hadn’t been passed before November 1934.
So why should voters be leery of economic redistribution in times of economic distress?
Perhaps because they realize that they stand to gain much more from a vibrantly growing economy than from redistribution of a stagnant economic pie. A growing economy produces many unanticipated opportunities. Redistribution edges toward a zero-sum game.
They miss growth when it is absent. They don’t appreciate it so much when it is happening.
Roosevelt’s 1934 and 1936 victories were won in periods of growth. After the economy shifted into recession in 1937, New Deal Democrats fared much worse, and Roosevelt won his third and fourth terms as a seasoned wartime leader, not an economic redistributor.
Lesson: If you want redistribution, you’d better first produce growth. Which the Obama Democrats’ policies have failed to do.
— Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. Click here to contact him. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelBarone.
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» on 12.30.11 @ 01:19 PM
Mr. Barone is a too-comfortable Sophist defender of those who pay him for his words. That’s regrettable, since he is a very bright guy, who could do much better, if he had the courage to preach truth to power.
Barone doesn’t seem very eager to grapple with the emerging statistics from many sources, including the 2010 Census, which indicate that the 25-year impact of Reaganomics (which Barone fervently supported) and its GW Bush Tax Cuts for the Very Rich, have done more to widen the income gap between America’s top 0.5% of super wealthy and everyone else, than any combination of factors since the end of the Gilded Age, 120 years ago.
Only Barone could examine the totality of these wide-ranging economic data,
and derive from them the idea that America’s ever-poorer 99.5% of people do
not want Government to defend them from the avarice of the 0.5%.
As millions are out of work, Barone doesn’t worry about all the jobs exported to
Viet-Nam, China, the Phillipines, to make more money for corporate CEOs and
their rich investors.
As millions face losing their homes, or mortgages way under water, due to an
artificial real estate bubble, immense mortgage underwriting and appraisal fraud, Barone worries about “expanding government’s role”, even though it was
the paralysis of government in the Rove-Cheney-Greenspan-Bush years that
allowed this excess and unethical behavior to flourish.
Wouldn’t it be neat for Barone to go to bed one evening, and experience in his
sleep, a Bob Cratchit existence, or the dark-variation from “It’s a Wonderful
Life”.
Would he wake up with his current Rove mindset? Or, like Scrooge, would he have the moral courage to re-examine the world through more open eyes?
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» on 01.04.12 @ 04:16 PM
That is your opinion Publius. The biggest factor in the widening of the income gap is not Reagonomics or lack of taxation or not enough regulation as you liberals keep screeching about. The biggest factor is actually our lack of production and high energy costs. If you regard truth so much, do your homework first.
Our lack of production is related to our consumption of value over our production of value meaning we consume more than we make. We have spent so much time glorifying consumimg professions while denigrating producing professions that we hardly noticed that we have spent 4 decades borrowing our prosperity. Add to that the increased cost of doing everything because we decided to import our energy rather than find ways to produce it our selves.
The gap is not some dopy social justice issue like so many liberals expound on. You live in the freest country on earth with the greatest opportunities for your own success. Don’t cry to me that you are poor and don’t have everything some rich guy does when you didn’t do anything to earn it. It doesn’t matter if some rich guy inherited it either, it’s not yours.
Cheap abundant oil and making more than we consumed made the middle class in this country and elevated the poor to its highest living standard, not some idiot political philosophy based on the robbing hood principle or the fascist philosophy of having a few megalomaniacs tell every one else how to live their lives.
If you want to see the income gap drop, then stop getting in the way of energy production and manufacturing of durable goods. That and stop glorifying the non producers in our society like lawyers, entertainers, bankers, investors and all the other parasites sucking us dry.
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