Kristol helped build the alternate universe in which nearly all of the Republican candidates, with the exception of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, spend most, if not all, of their time.
In this universe, the conservatism of Ronald Reagan—whose library served as the stage for the debate—has ushered in what Kristol called “very impressive economic growth over the last quarter century” that has not only benefited America but much of the world. Countries like China and India, by implementing Reagan’s formula of supply-side economics, deregulation and open markets “brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.”... This is, of course, not the world the rest of us live in ...
... Kristol scoffed at “stagflation” and “70 percent marginal tax rates” under President Jimmy Carter, but according to government data compiled by Spriggs, job growth during the Carter administration was actually higher (3.1 percent) than under Reagan’s two terms (2.1 percent). During the Clinton administration, job growth was 2.4 percent. Job growth during the terms of both George W. Bush and his father has been well under 1 percent. Median family incomes, in constant dollars, rose faster under both Carter and Clinton than they did under Reagan and the two Bushes.
...But while progressives like Spriggs have statistics, Kristol claims a whole city—New York City, in fact. “We had a very interesting test case in New York,” he said, of a city governed under “liberal principles” that he characterized as unsafe and dysfunctional until Giuliani cleaned up the city, cut the tax rates, got tough on crime and forced people off the welfare rolls.
Funny, though, that Giuliani’s experiment with urbanized Reaganomics coincided with the Clinton economic boom, a rising tide that lifted liberal and conservative ships alike. And yet, a report prepared for the New York City council noted that under Giuliani median incomes in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens actually fell between 1999 and 2002, and rose only by a few dollars in Brooklyn and Staten Island. If Giuliani-style conservative economics were so great for New York, how do he and Kristol explain the finding in the report that “the annual earnings and hourly wages dropped for New Yorkers at the bottom of the earnings ladder from 2003 to 2004 by 5.1 percent and hourly wages declined by 5.5 percent?”
That was just one of the areas in which the conservative analysis of the last three decades, as laid out in the Kuttner-Kristol debate, failed to connect with reality. Many of us remember how Reagan made it seem real—Reagan says, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and the Soviet Union falls—but how quickly we forget that Reagan was a trained actor working with an admittedly skillfully written screenplay, and that the Soviet Union would have fallen without the dramatics and the billions of tax dollars diverted from domestic needs and spent on weaponry.
The screenplay, however, is no longer resonating with voters who want policies that speak to the economic stresses they and their neighbors are experiencing. “Fewer and fewer and fewer voters are buying either the ideology or the incumbent,” Kuttner said, citing a recent Gallup poll that indicated the percentage of voters who believe the rich have too much money and that the government should do more for the poor “are at their highest since 1939.”
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