Today's Must-Read: It's the Economy, Stupid!

It's a given that Republicans don't know how to manage the economy (and you have to manage the economy -- when left to its own devices, we get 1929 or 2008). Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo builds on a piece by Ryan Cooper on how the Democrats have now embraced Republican-style economic management:

After three decades of New Deal programs that gave the country "the greatest economic boom in American history" and broadly shared prosperity, the 1970s began a slow return to the kind of economics that dominated the decades ahead of the Great Depression. That model, which functioned instead "on behalf of a tiny elite," focused on "deregulation, tax and spending cuts, union busting, and free trade." New Deal regulatory structures, Chicago School economists insisted, were "a drag on economic growth."

That in itself is a curious formulation, and an even more curious response to decades of boom that produced the largest middle class in the history of the world. A drag how? It is the [s]ame response that has produced the insistence over the last year of soaring corporate profits that large corporate tax cuts were necessary to kick-start an economy that for titans of industry was already performing brilliantly. After building the largest, most evenly distributed wealth -- lin the world (African Americans would disagree), returning to rule by an oligarchy wasn't happening fast enough?

To answer that last question, No, of course not: they want it all and they want it right now.

So now we have both parties subscribing to an economic philosophy that has been proven, time and again, to be bullshit -- at least, in terms of what the New Deal gave us, and to which politicians of all stripes pay lip service, if nothing else.

Read it. And think about what your life is going to be like in the new Gilded Age.