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Someday I may understand our Republican Congress. Last year its leader, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, gave an interview wherein he explained his ideal -- an American that looked like a Saturday Evening Post or Readers Digest in about 1956.
Now, you can like or not like that vision, but it is quite clear: a wholesome, stable society with low rates of crime and unemployment, and high rates of home ownership and education.
So, if that's the GOP goal for America, you'd think that Republican congressional policies would push the country in that direction.
Think again.
The white-bread America that Gingrich professes to admire was to some degree the result of federal policies and programs.
For instance, the income tax then was quite progressive -- the highest bracket for the top earners was more than 80 percent.
It is conceivable that a corporate executive back then
would reason that It's silly to put more money into
salaries for us executives. The government would just take
it all anyway. Instead, we should invest in research and
development, and in finding ways to make our employees more
productive so that we can keep them all, perhaps even hire
some more people, and use their time well.
Things don't work that way any more. The idea now is to pay the CEO and other favored folks $10 or $20 million a year, to terminate as many employees as possible, to move production offshore to Manila or Singapore, to look no further than the next quarterly earnings report which means minimal research and development, and to write off any asset that is not fetching the maximum return.
And how does the Republican Congress proposed to tackle this problem and bring us back to the halcyon days of 1956?
With a flat-rate income tax of perhaps 19 percent, so that the CEO gets to keep more of his $20 million a year. That's certainly going to encourage him to direct his company to invest in more jobs for Americans, isn't it?
There are some good reasons to like a flat tax. But it isn't one of those things that will return America to the beloved era when Arthur Godfrey was the raciest thing on TV, Clarabelle's seltzer bottle on Howdy Doody was the worst media influence on children, the Yankees won the Series every year and Mom was waiting at home with milk and cookies when school got out.
One reason Mom could be there in 1956 is that Dad got paid a living wage, so that Mom didn't have to join the labor force.
Back then, about 30 percent of the workforce belonged to unions. Now it's about 15 percent. And have you noticed anything in the Contract with America that encourages more union membership?
I haven't either, and I haven't noticed any efforts to repeal those replacement-worker laws, either.
To look at this another way, back then the average house payment took about 18 percent of the average workingman's wage. Federal policies subsidized home ownership with the FHA and VA loans.
Now the house payment takes about 40 percent of one average wage, which means you need two wage-earners if you're going to have much more than that roof over your head. And have you heard anything from the Contract Congress about increasing housing subsidies?
Another factor behind that serene and prosperous 1956 America was a federal subsidy which encouraged higher education -- the GI Bill.
And how does the current Congress propose to return us to that happy condition? By continuing to cut loans and grants to students pursuing higher education.
The small town of the 1956 vision also had public
transportation in the form of passenger train service, made
possible by federal mail-hauling contracts that were also a
subsidy. Its small downtown businesses could survive
because there were fair trade
laws which allowed
manufacturers to set price floors.
Congress is busy eliminating rail subsidies to Amtrak and air subsidies for serving remote towns, and it isn't about to re-instate those price-fixing laws.
Now, I don't want to argue that America should return to the status of 1956. Those Norman Rockwell scenes obscured some gruesome realities: women who couldn't exercise their talents, rural poverty, contaminated air and water, millions of Americans whose color denied them any chance at voting or even getting served at the local diner.
But I'm not the one who's offering that as a vision of how America should be in 1996. Newt Gingrich is. And yet, he hasn't taken a single step to move in that direction. Instead, he has moved society, insofar as federal action can move society, in precisely the opposite direction.
See why I have trouble understanding this Congress? Maybe I'll manage it, though, if the next epidemic is not flu, but clinical schizophrenia. Two minds have to be better than one if you're trying to figure out how to get to 1956 while eliminating everything that made 1956 possible.
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