The latest news from what Paul Krugman calls the "policy elite" -- many of us have come to think of it as the scum at the top of the pond -- is that we consumer/voter/numbnuts created the recession all by ourselves.
The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.
Most of us have figured out the policy elite (what a phrase to describe citizens in a democracy!) did it all by themselves.
The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
Reagan laughed all the way to the bank and is probably villain-in-chief. George W. Bush is the more relevant contemporary villain, perhaps rightly so. He "cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority."
It's pretty simple and unarguable. Look at the recorded history of that series of disastrous Republican administrations.
Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?
One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.
But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.
We the people are paying the bills and will always pay the highest price if we don't end Reagan's "morning in America."
