Trickle Down Conservatism Infects America

Rick Perlstein
April 27, 2007

Rick Perlstein is a blogger for the Campaign for America's Future.

When your job is documenting how conservatism has failed America, the newspaper looks different. Take Wednesday's USA Today —specifically, that silly page no one reads with a tiny news item from every state. Fifty dots, ones never intended to be connected into a common tale, except the one entitled, "Here's Some Stuff that Happened on April 25, 2007."

Connect them, however, as data points in the consequences of the national experiment of giving conservatives the keys to all three branches to our government, and something more coherent emerges.

SOUTH CAROLINA: Columbia - State lawmakers have started debating two spending plans that could shave pennies off grocery bills or trim income taxes for wealthier residents. The grocery tax cut would save shoppers $1 for each $100 spent and eliminate the tax in the future. Gov. Sanford contends that reducing the state's income tax for top earners would spur the economy.

The bottom line, in other words: Save a couple of bucks a week on groceries if you're an ordinary Joe or Jane. Save tens of thousands a year on income taxes if you're a "top earner." Madness. But entirely consistent with conservative "philosophy," which claims that helping ordinary people might make them lazy and indolent, but that "reducing the top marginal rate," something that effects only rich people, makes the world a better place—the "trickle down" theory that one of its very architects, Reagan budget director David Stockman, admitted actually created "fiscal catastrophe."