How the GOP became the Party of the Rich (Rolling Stone)

[gateley]

(I apologize that I can't seem to cut/ paste on my iPad for some reason -- but it's a good article if you're interested.b. )



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109

[qb]

1. I have to admit I've lost interest in music articles, but damn, their political writing rocks!

Jon Stewart's Springsteen interview that covered both topics was excellent.

That reminds me of something I read months ago about a new Republican publication intended to reach America's youth. Whatever happened to that?

[gateley]

4. I know! And Taibbi has been relentless exposing the banking corruption.

[1-Old-Man]

5. I don't know what they mean by "youth"

When I found out that the President of the "Young Republicans" was dam near 40 years old I realized it was just another Republican distortion. There may be young idiots, but there are very few young people who actually vote as Republicans, I'm sure of that. All those clowns with their Confederate flags on the pick up trucks, they may be ass-hats but they don't actually vote in any significant numbers. Poor white trash avoid the polls like the plague., at least that has been my observation. The dumber they are the less likely they will show up. The sole exception to this are the poor white trash jesus freaks, these are the wife-beaters and drunks who show up in church every sunday; they listen to their Preacher and think he is the Lord but in truth he's just some clown who copied his Sermon off late night AM hate radio.

[life long demo]

2. Thanks for the article. I read most of it and have a different take

I admit I did not read the complete article, but from what I absorbed it seemed to concentrate on Reagan era. Please feel free to correct me. But I must say that I can remember my father saying to my siblings and I way, way back that the republicans were for the rich and the democrats were for the workers. Since my father died in 1956, you can see how far back that was. This isn't relatively new, it's just on steroids now. Maybe that's what the article points to?

[gateley]

3. I think that it escalated under Reagan and they really

focused on greed. I agree that I've always viewed the Republican party that way (like your dad said), but not to the extent it is now.

[pampango]

6. It seems to let Reagan off the hook and blame republicans from 1997 on.

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?" The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!" The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."

George Voinovich, the former GOP senator from Ohio, likens his party's new guard to arsonists whose attitude is: "We're going to get what we want or the country can go to hell." Even an architect of the Bush tax cuts, economist Glenn Hubbard, tells Rolling Stone that there should have been a "revenue contribution" to the debt-ceiling deal, "structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do."