If it weren’t bad enough that he’s become the face of leveraged buyouts, Mitt Romney is facing another fresh challenge in the next three primary and caucus states. As Arthur Delaney points out at Huffington Post, the first two states to vote for a GOP nominee have weathered the recession relatively well—a boon for the laissez-faire frontrunner. It’s a different story in the next three: South Carolina and Florida, with 9.9 and 10 percent unemployment respectively, and Nevada, which tops the country in both unemployment (13 percent) and foreclosures (one of every 16 homes in 2011).

While Romney has a fat jobs plan—59 points, people!—it sounds strikingly old-school after 32 years of Reaganomics: cut corporate and capital-gains taxes, reduce regulations, and (here’s a departure) clamp down on “cheating” China.

 

The Teapublican Kool-Aid. No thanks, I don't want any please...

As yet another statue of Ronald Reagan is unveiled – a $1 million one at Washington’s National Airport which was renamed in his honor in the mid-1990s – the key question about the 40th president is whether his long and destructive era is finally coming to an end.

More than any other political figure, it was Ronald Reagan who put America on its present course toward stunning income inequality and into a brave new world of deregulated industries, which were then able to exploit lax government controls to devastate the economy.

Congressional Budget Office study that came out last week was  “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007. Perhaps a more accurate name for the study, based on the results, might be “Why Republican Economic Policies Tend to be Bad for Your Health”. Because what the study essentially shows is that practically from the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s first term in office after being elected in 1980, until 2007 (the time period covered by the study) the massive gap in wealth distribution between the wealthy and the poor went from the size of the Mississippi River to the Grand Canyon. Thanks to Reagan’s “trickle down” economics, and all the related protect-the-rich-at-all-costs policies that have been developed in its wake, the vast majority of Americans have effectively had government-sanctioned weights attached to their ankles as they attempt to climb out of their financial misery while the wealthiest 1 percent have been provided with every conceivable tool to become even wealthier at the expense of the rest of us.

In other words, we’re not going to lower the unemployment rate – and subsequently reduce out deficit – until we end this extreme income inequality that has grown to stratospheric rates over time. Rich people wanting to keep their tax cuts is impoverishing the rest of the country. It’s no accident that the highest two points of stratification of the distribution of wealth in America can be seen in 1928 and 2007, one year before both the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era in American economics as he cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down again to 28%. In order to get support for doing this from the people, and also from politicians, a very crafty set of lies were produced. As David Stockman, then Reagan’s budget director, put it: giving small tax cuts across the board to all brackets was simply a “Trojan Horse” that was used to get approval for the huge top tax bracket cuts. “Trickle-Down” was a term used by Republicans that meant giving tax cuts to the rich.

One of the dominating justifications that the right uses for its economic policies is that lowering taxes and regulations on society’s wealthiest members and big businesses will cause an explosion of wealth that will eventually “trickle down” to the vast majority of Americans. Yet while a record number of Americans are receiving some form of government assistance as unemployment remains high and the economy is in shambles, one group is doing very well: corporate America. The 2011 Fortune 500 list was unveiled today, surveying the growth and profits of the nation’s largest 500 corporations. It found that the profits of these companies “soared 81″ percent over the past year, causing the editors of Fortune to say that “we’ve rarely seen such a stark gulf between the fortunes of the 500 and those of ordinary Americans”: