The 13 most feared words in the English language

[San Siro]

di Piero Scaruffi

(march 2009)

The 13 most feared words in the English language: "It is an old Ronald Reagan idea and it is still around today". The USA has been haunted for three decades by really bad ideas that Ronald Reagan introduced (see the previous article with the same title The 13 most feared words in the English language).
One of them was the "trickle-down" economics. The origins of the current depression (although i blamed it on Bush when i first predicted it years ago, see How Bush engineered a new depression and How Bush engineered the worst recession in modern times) ultimately lie in Reagan's policies. Jared Bernstein's book "Crunch" sould become mandatory reading for all right-wing politicians and supporters. He writes that "Economics has been hijacked by the rich and powerful" and then uses reliable statistics to show that it started under Reagan and it kept creating poverty for three decades. David Cay Johnston has calculated that between 1980 (when Ronald Reagan was elected president) and 2005 the per-capita GDP of the USA, adjusted for inflation, increased 66%. However, the disposable income of the average USA household increased by much less and actually decreased if one does not count wives who were not working before but had to go and work afterwards to make ends meet. Basically, the average USA family had to double the amount it worked in other to make approximately the same amount of money. In the meantime, the richest USA citizens and corporations really (not just theoretically) increased their incomes. At the same time the rest of the world started getting richer and richer. Both the Western Europeans and the Japanese remember the early Reagan years as the years during which their currencies appreciated wildly against the dollar. USA tourists had been kings until the 1970s. From the 1980s on they became less and less able to spend as much as Europeans and Japanese, because the dollar was worth less and less, while the European and Japanese currencies were worth more and more. Japan suddenly became an economic world power. The USA's share of the world's GDP kept declining, and that decline has never stopped.
Despite all the evidence that Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed the "American dream", the Republican Party resurrected its policies under George W Bush. No big surprise that, again, the dollar collapsed and the standard of living declined. The USA goot poorer and poorer.
One almost suspects that this is all part of one huge right-wing conspiracy: since they cannot force their unbridled form of capitalist fascism on the USA masses, they decided to bankrupt the country until the country will become no more and no less than a banana republic ripe for a right-wing coup. As their prophet Grover Norquist famously said: "Our goal is to shrink the government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub."
The scary thing is that the Republican Party and its right-wing cheerleaders (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter) don't seem to have learned anything. Their solution for the economic depression that they caused is simple: don't change anything, except stop spending (after they spent huge sums of money for eight years and bankrupted the USA). This may indeed finally cause the end of the USA and the triumph of their three-decade right-wing conspiracy.