The trickle down theory is actually just the rich

Pissing on the poor. But we can remember how government can and did work, how all of us were able to be in on the American dream. We can remember. And vote.

Krugman:

The leading Republican candidates for president don’t even seem to realize that there’s a problem. A few months ago Rudy Giuliani, denouncing Hillary Clinton’s economic proposals, declared that “she wants to go back to the 1990s” — as if that would be a bad thing.

In fact, memories of how much better the economy was under Bill Clinton will be a potent political advantage for the Democrats next year.

But simply putting another Clinton, or any Democrat, in the White House won’t ensure that the good times will roll again. President Clinton was a good economic manager, but much of the good news during the 1990s reflected events that won’t be repeated, including low oil prices and the great medical cost pause — the temporary leveling off of health care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. that took place in the 1990s despite his failure to pass health care reform.

And there are good reasons to think that the negative effects of globalization on the wages of some Americans are larger than they were in the ’90s. That’s a hugely contentious issue within the progressive movement, with no easy resolution. I’ll write more about it in the months ahead.

Despite these caveats, Democrats have every right to make a political issue out of the failure of the Bush economy to deliver gains to working Americans — especially because conservatives continue to insist that tax cuts for the affluent are the answer to all problems.

But Democrats shouldn’t kid themselves into believing that this will be easy. The next president won’t be able to deliver another era of good times unless he or she manages to tackle the longer-term trends that underlie today’s economic disappointment: a collapsing health care system and inexorably rising inequality.