[lbo-talk] Bush econ agenda

Todd Archer todda39 at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 10 16:19:38 PDT 2004



>"There's a philosophical divide in this campaign," Mr. Bush said in a
>town-hall forum at Northern Virginia Community College near here yesterday.
>"My judgment is government ought to be empowering people by giving them
>more control over their lives," he added.
>
>This week Mr. Bush will travel to the swing states of Florida, New Mexico,
>Nevada and Arizona, to promote, among other things, his plan injecting more
>flexibility into federal job-training programs, by giving workers vouchers
>and greater choice on where they spend them.
>
>The Bush campaign also unveiled yesterday a television ad titled
>"Ownership," where Mr. Bush speaks for 30 seconds over pictures of a house,
>workers, and companies, ending: "Because I understand if you own something,
>you have a vital stake in the future of America."

This is interesting. Squares with the ideology of "self-" that went on during the 90s (the whole "do-it-yourself-on-line" shtick that prompted people into thinking they could manage their own stocks and win big). Of course, once the downturn hits, the majority, unlucky ones get hosed.

I've been reading this interesting book, "Lost in the Suburbs" by Stephen Dale. It's dated (1999); when it came out during the "Common Sense Revolution" of Mike Harris and the Ontario Tories, I couldn't afford it in hardback at the time and forgot about it after it left the store.

The author basically is interested in the "905 phenomenon", that section of the Toronto burbs that voted most heavily in favour of the Tories at the time. The interesting phenomenon he encounters is this recurring story of people who "made it good" and wanted to get out of the city into the burbs, but then, once the boom that got them out there soured, they found themselves trapped into paying out mortgages for homes they couldn't afford (many apparently gambled on the housing market and lost when prices went belly-up), spending too much time commuting, and generally getting more and more miserable. Dale hints this lot of tired, frightened people are the main ones who helped put Harris into power.

I dread what could happen should squeezed middle-class people buy into Bush's rhetoric, get "theirs", then have the economy hit a bad spot. Man, people could REALLY go bananas, what with "theirs" now gone and there being little in the way of a safety net. They'd be looking for a neck to squeeze.

Todd

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