A Second Look at the Age of Political Awareness

In my last blog I talked about that today’s young people have grown up in an age of supply side economics/voodoo economics/Austrian School economics/laissez faire economics that came with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) who believed the government had too much influence in the market system. Or in his words, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” a quote that has been used by conservatives ever since. And thus massive deregulation began, huge tax cuts to the wealthy began and the slide of wealth to the top few of the country began.

Thus college students faced with the problems caused by this back sliding economic philosophy (in contrast to the New Deal and demand side, Keynesian economics that drew up out of the Great Depression and put the American Dream in place for the middle class and more, have little time to think politically, they just want to get a job.

With some more thought I refigured the ages impacted by this economics conservative thinking. When did you begin to become politically aware? Some of us in high school began to get some inkling of politics, generally parroting the values our parents taught us. Others, fortunate to go to college and take a course in economics or listen to current speakers could begin to compare the thinking of Ayn Rand and Keynes and began to develop a more independent view of economics. If you put an average of 20 or 21 as a time of coming of age in economic and political thought that shove the current time for living in a world of laissez faire economics into ones 50’s or even more.

Of course, there are those, perhaps the majority who never developed a conscious reasoned sense of politics and economics and just succumb of current pontifications of newspaper and TV journalism. This seems to be a common view of Europeans towards the voters of our country – that we are just remarkably uninformed and uneducated about these matters.

Coupled with the above are those who did relatively well economically during the conservative age, and reflect the Republican motto, "I've got mine, screw you." And the spend their timed condemning a tiny fraction of the population that about social programs as thought that would fix anything. They conviently complain about Demcratic spenders forgetting the the real national debt increasers have been primarily Republicans not Democrats; only democratic Jimmy Carter raised the debt, all the rest since Reagan (who really raised it) were Republicans.

Again, where will the populist reformers of our times come? Who knows, but I am not betting on the young but those who have been suffering the results of voodoo economics for years and have studied enough to understand where it came from despite the lobbying and propaganda of the moneyed power brokers such as the Koch brothers.

The data is out there and I believe more and more understand it. Thus we see leaders such as Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren in congress speaking the plain truth about our age and commentators with world experience and wisdom such as Robert Reich leading the away toward needed progressive movements to benefit the middle and lower classes as it used to be when we had a real two party system, democracy and not a plutocracy.

If you have not seen Robert Reich’s movie, “Inequality for All” please try to do so. I have watched it, own it, and find it remarkably informing for one and all.