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By Root 718 0

instead of holding them accountable for their unwise mortgage gambles and helped underwater home-owners who shouldn’t have taken on subprime, variable-rate mortgages in the first place. They also opposed the federal legislation to aid and restructure the auto industry, believing that American companies should live with the consequences of past mistakes. I disagreed with all these positions because I thought the failure of our financial system, the lingering home-mortgage debacle, and the loss of America’s ability to make cars and trucks would hurt tens of millions of hardworking, responsible citizens who had not contributed to our problems. Still, I admired the original Tea Party activists’ call for more responsibility in America from top to bottom. It was sad to see the movement morph into one that kept the rhetoric of accountability but applied it only to the middle class and the working poor. Now too many foot soldiers in the antigovernment brigade are fighting for policies that protect their financial backers, promote inequality, punish hardworking middle-class Americans, increase poverty, and prevent the restoration of a strong economy.

The antigovernment movement’s most cherished conviction is that we can’t raise taxes on the “job creators.” And not just while the economy is weak—not ever. Indeed, if it were up to them, they would cut taxes on high-income Americans even more, as they pledged to do in the 2010 campaign, and use the revenue shortfall as a reason to eliminate even more of the federal government than they have proposed to do in 2011.

The biggest problem with their argument is that we tried it their way for twenty of the last thirty years, and their strategy of using blanket tax cuts for high-income individuals didn’t work. In these twenty years, average job growth was under one million per year, income inequality increased dramatically, more people fell from the middle class back into poverty, and more middle-class people with nonexistent pay raises kept up with inflation by maxing out their credit cards and taking second mortgages on their homes, until household debt exceeded 125 percent of income.

The Tea Party retort, of course, is that past Republican presidents and members of Congress were committed to cutting taxes and weakening regulation but weren’t really serious about cutting spending. They say they are serious about it and that will make all the difference. They’re right about that. They are serious about it, and if their policies prevail, it will make a difference. It will make things worse.

To see why, let’s look at the impact that weak job growth, growing inequality, more money flowing to financial transactions that don’t create growth and jobs, and less public and private investment in our long-term economic success have already had. We can do that by comparing how America stacks up against our major competitors today, and how those nations’ policies compare with what the antigovernment ideologues advocate.

The first chart shows how we’re doing in various economic and quality-of-life measures compared with other countries that the International Monetary Fund classifies as “advanced.” There are thirty-three of them. Many are small, like Cyprus and Malta. Some are in deep economic trouble, like Greece. None of the rapidly rising countries like China, India, Brazil, and Russia are on the list yet, because their per capita income isn’t high enough. But the rest of our serious competitors for the future are covered.

The first column measures income inequality. We rank third, with only Singapore and Hong Kong having a more unequal distribution of income. Sweden, Norway, Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Finland have the most equal income distribution, along with a couple of smaller economies.

On unemployment, the United States, at 9 percent, ranks eighth highest, with a lower rate than Spain, claiming by far the highest rate at 20 percent, followed by Slovakia, Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, France (9.5 percent), and the Czech Republic. The lowest unemployment rate is Singapore’s at 2.3 percent,