Tim Pawlenty Wants the Rich to Get Richer

My father used to say that Ronald Reagan's genius was in convincing so many members of the middle class that they could afford to vote Republican.  I wonder how many people will be convinced by Tim Pawlenty.

Appearing on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, Pawlenty proposed cutting top income tax rates and getting rid of taxes on dividends, capital gains, interest income, and estates.  According to Pawlenty, these tax cuts would pay for themselves by sparking GDP growth of 5% per year for ten years.  Never mind the fact that sustaining that kind of growth for that length of time is a pipe dream.


So wouldn't such policies likely increase wealth inequality in America?  Sure but Pawlenty doesn't care:

The measure of a successful economy is not whether some small percentage of people get a little more wealth or a little less wealth. . . . I don't care if we shift the wealth a little this way or that way. . . .  Don't measure this by whether of few more people get a little wealthy or not.

Pawlenty made it clear who he is looking out for,  "Every business leader across every sector of this economy large or small across the whole country that I meet with says essentially the same thing,  'Get the government off my back'."   Like the way that government got off Wall Street's back over the last thirty years?  How did that work out?

Pawlenty Counting on Ignorance

In a speech today in Chicago, Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty is expected to play the class warfare card according to The Huffington Post:

"President Obama is a champion practitioner of class warfare," Pawlenty will say, according to advance excerpts. "He has spent three years dividing our nation, fanning the flames of class envy and resentment to deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America."

What pure and utter crap.  Any class envy and resentment that exists is the result of Republican economic policies of the last three decades which have made the rich richer while the American middle class stagnates or falls behind.

As the following graph from the Paris School of Economics shows, the richest 1% of Americans earned 8.18% of total income in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected.   (H/T The Big Picture) Today the richest 1% of Americans earn 17.67%.  Income distributions have been nowhere near as skewed in other major industrialized nations like Japan, France, and Australia.  During that time, America has gone from being the world's biggest creditor to its biggest debtor, median incomes have gone nowhere, and America's manufacturing base has deteriorated.

Pawlenty's prescription for the economy is more of the same policies that got us where we are today: tax cuts for the rich, less regulation of business, and further dismantling of the social safety net.

It would be nice to think that voters aren't that stupid, but the signs are not encouraging.