Both parties are again bidding frantically for the fickle (or so Democrats hope) affections of the middle class and the bidding is again a tax-cutting competition. But wait. The cycle may be an illusion. The return of 1981 in 1991 suggests progress: Democrats may be educable after all. They have discovered the middle class, the location of most of America’s votes and money. Democrats may have recognized that they cannot get enough of the former if they seem determined to grasp much of the latter.
Discovering the middle class in America is like noticing wheat in Nebraska: not much of an achievement. But for Democrats, it is a start. It started with Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, whose party was trounced in his state three times in presidential contests in the 1980s, averaging just 40.2 percent of the vote. Bentsen wants to cut taxes for the middle class and pay for this by additional defense cuts.
There is a swelling chorus of similar proposals. Sen. Harris Wofford, a Democrat appointed when John Heinz died in a plane crash, is an underdog running against former governor Dick Thornburgh in a special election next week. But Wofford is making it close by saying: “It is time to take care of our own people, the middle class.” The phrase “our own people” does not distinguish Americans from foreigners; rather, it distinguishes middle class Americans from affluent Americans and, note well, from the poor. If history is cyclical, Democrats soon will say: Tax cuts for the middle class will stimulate the economy, and benefits will trickle down to the poor.
Recently the country has seen too much of our legislators, seeing them as a gaggle of check-kiting, judge-smearing deadbeats who don’t pay their restaurant bills but raise their pay in the middle of the night. Many Americans (this columnist included) who hitherto said tax increases are justified by the budget deficit now say: Give that mob more money? Never. (My position now is: Not a nickel of new taxes until term limits change the political culture on Capitol Hill.) For Congress, cutting taxes is a way of diverting attention from its comportment. For Bush, tax cuts are a way of changing some numbers, perhaps those pertaining to the sluggish economy, certainly those appearing in recent polls.
A Washington Post-ABC poll puts the president’s “reelect number” (the portion of the electorate inclined to vote for him) at 47 percent. Bush aides find that number dismayingly low. It is surprisingly high considering how badly America is being governed by a president who devotes most of his energies to foreign policies that involve much pandering to dictators in Damascus, Beijing and elsewhere. Bush has packed his shirts and socks for his next spasm of dashing around the world (Spain, Italy, Holland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia, all by early December) and he evidently is mystified as to why anyone thinks he may be scanting domestic problems. The Post-ABC poll shows 70 percent of Americans think he spends too much time on foreign policy. (Three percent–they must have interesting minds-say he spends too little.)
Today the manufacturing sector is stalled and inflation is accelerating. For two years real GNP has inched up at a compound annual rate of just 0.2 percent, and reasonable forecasters expect at least four more quarters below 2 percent. Recessions occur even in healthy economies, but bad governance has made America’s economy, and society, sick. Since the 1973 oil shocks, Americans’ real after-tax incomes have barely risen, a minuscule 0.5 percent annually. This 18-year stagnation is unprecedented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As many workers’ real incomes have declined, families have maintained living standards by sending more mothers into the work force, with consequent family stresses and a pervasive erosion of the sense of well-being.
Government borrowing to finance soaring deficits has reduced the rate of private investment. The U.S. rate of productivity growth is the poorest among the seven largest industrial nations. The proportion of the population living in poverty has virtually stopped shrinking and is composed disproportionately of children. Strangling in litigation, its schools failing, America now ranks just sixth among the world’s nations in per capita GNP, about where, Paul McCracken notes, Argentina was at the turn of the century. Argentina sank; America is sinking. There is a word for all this: malaise.
Democrats in Congress say their tax cuts would help the economy. Perhaps. But while they are talking economics they are thinking polities. Still, that is welcome evidence that they are sentient. They have noticed that New Jersey Democrats are battening down the hatches, expecting stormy weather in next week’s state legislative elections. The electorate will express itself about the $2.8 billion tax increase enacted by Governor Florio after saying in his campaign that no new taxes seemed necessary. Recently 40,000 seething taxpayers overflowed the statehouse lawn in Connecticut to protest the new state income tax. That crowd–1.5 percent of the state’s population–is equivalent to a national rally of 3.8 million. (Imagine all of Chicago showing up on the Washington Mall, in a foul mood.)
Cyclical theories of history result from, and foster, fatalism: mankind is caught in a rut, going around in circles. But fatalism is, strictly speaking, un-American. As a quintessential American (Emerson) said, intellect annuls fate. Mankind can think and choose and escape from ruts. Last week, while two of baseball’s former weaklings, the Twins and the Braves, waged the “worst-to-first” World Series, the Democratic Party, which recently has been the Cleveland Indians of presidential politics, began remembering how to think about a middle class country that believes, with reason, that the government has more money–25 percent of GNP, a peacetime record–than is good for it.
