Let us begin the change

By Sybil Hinkle

When Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee for U.S. president, faced his 1984 opponent in a debate and said, “He won’t tell you that he will do it, but I will. I will raise your taxes,” he might as well have added, “and with that statement I hereby hand this election to my opponent, Ronald Reagan.”

“No new taxes” became the Reagan mantra, and the voters dutifully punished the honesty of the Democratic candidate by electing Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

Three of the last four presidents have been Republican, and all three of them have followed what became known as Reaganomics. Tax breaks for the rich. High government spending on war and defense. Low investment in community and infrastructure. Deregulation and lax government oversight.

A former movie star with good looks and a way with words, Reagan went on to captivate Americans and win re-election. Reagan, once a Democrat, came to believe that the early Roosevelt philosophies from the Great Depression were anathema to the society he wished to build. His vision of government was focused on the strong and the thriving. If you rewarded them with tax breaks and kept government out of the way, they would then invest and produce a thriving economy that would benefit all. This was known as supply-side economics or the “trickle-down” theory.

Government programs aimed to help the less fortunate he found wasteful and non-productive, and he hit at liberals who promoted such things. “They gave a war on poverty,” he once proclaimed, “and guess what? Poverty won.” As for a belief that government should have a role helping citizens in their everyday lives, his disdain was captured in another well-known quote: “The scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Government, he maintained, was the problem, not the answer.

The national debt when Reagan came into office grew from $994 billion to $4.4 trillion. Bill Clinton, the lone Democrat among the last four presidents, won office in 1992. Clinton was obsessed with changing the priorities of the Reagan years, beginning with the massive deficit Reagan had amassed and the large military buildup the country had witnessed. With the Omnibus Bill of 1992 (illustrated in a clever Time Magazine publication in which Reagan was pictured upside-down) Clinton, with Vice President Gore’s tie-breaking vote, literally turned the Reagan taxing and spending priorities on their head. Every single Republican in both houses voted against it. Clinton’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 began a long and prosperous period for the country, raising taxes on 1.2 percent of the wealthiest in the country, creating an energy tax on all Americans and expanding the earned income tax credit for low-income families. This, along with a vigorous job-creation program, got the country moving.

It is difficult now to believe that when Clinton left office in 2000 the country was on its way to becoming a debt-free nation for the first time since 1835. Much of what Clinton achieved in the way of job creation and the economic recovery has been overlooked in the examination of the impeachment battle that dominated the last years of his presidency.

Now with a banking crisis unfolding before us, one would have to ask, “Haven’t Americans had enough?” What does it take to prove that the policies beginning with Reagan and carried forward by the bushes have been an utter and disastrous failure? Isn’t the record a clear failure?

When Obama-Biden talk about change, they mean change the philosophy and the policies of the Bush-Cheney-Reagan years. They mean look at the McCain platform and see if you can distinguish it from the Republican programs of the past.

Sens. Obama and Biden believe we can change the Reagan philosophy. They believe in our constitutional government and do not wish to tear it apart. They believe in the rule of law. They believe in government by the people, all the people. They believe in the right to expect decent pay for decent work, the right for fairness in the tax structure, a right to economic security in old age, a right for all people of any age to expect decent health care. They believe we can alleviate poverty, rebuild our infrastructure, fix our bridges, improve our educational system and solve our immigrant problems, and at the same time, build a democracy that is the envy of the world. Because they believe these things, even though we have been brought to our knees by the economic position our once-rich nation finds itself in today and that progress toward these goals will take time, I am proud to say on Nov. 4 I am voting for Barack Obama and Joe Biden and I say, “Let us begin!”

(Hinkle lives in Napa.)

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009