Nick Taylor

Ian Reifowitz has a nice take in July 31 HuffPo on Romney objecting to the Obama quote he takes out of context: "All President Obama is saying is that an American who builds a business nevertheless relies on the investments made by America as a society in things like schools, that educate most of us, including people who work in each and every business, and of course the roads and bridges necessary for virtually all business owners to be able to send and receive goods, and for their employees to be able to get to work, and customers to be able to get to their stores." Here's the whole thing: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-reifowitz/mitt-romney-each-business_b_1719054.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

The best example of what he's talking about was the New Deal's investment in public infrastructure during the Depression. The New Deal's jobs programs brought America into the 20th century. It needs to happen again, for stimulus that provides customers and the infrastructure that connects business with those customers.  Read More 

It’s 1936 all over again for the Republicans.

By the last year of President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, the party of business had seen the shape of the New Deal, and it was terrified. Tough new banking regulations were in force. Taxes on employers would help fund the new government-run retirement system for all workers, and some people would even get money when they couldn’t work. The government was paying a vast army of the unemployed to build roads and bridges, which was bad enough, but artists and actors and writers were also getting paychecks to do whatever it was they did, and all on borrowed money. Collective bargaining and wage-and-hour laws meant labor was a rising force. Factories couldn’t even hire children any more.

The Supreme Court had done the best it could, striking down incursions into central planning. It might yet strike down the Social Security Act. But the New Deal government was set on reshaping and improving life for the majority, and the people in the board rooms didn’t like it. The taps of wealth opened to deny FDR a second term.

The rich man’s anti-New Deal coalition called itself the Liberty League. It formed in 1934 with du Pont gunpowder and the Morgan banking money behind it. The league foreshadowed Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and Karl Rove “Super PACS.”  Read More