It’s The Unfairness, Stupid

Posted on January 17, 2012 at 6:45 pm by JM Ashby

Via Greg Sargent, The Washington Post released the results of their latest poll today and found that, by a wide margin, more people now consider inequality to be a bigger economic problem than big government regulation.

What do you think is the bigger problem in this country — unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy, or over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity?

Economic unfairness : 55
Market overregulation: 35

Is this a sign that President Obama and the Democratic Party is winning the message war as a whole? Possibly. I think it is.

The idea that regulations are the ultimate job killers in this country is a well-entrenched idea which has faced little to no challenge from the corporate media and has only been challenged on a regular basis by the Democratic party in more recent years. President Obama is also the first president in modern history to regularly reject the idea that government is the problem in nearly every speech he makes.

If the trend continues, and the economy continues to improve as all indicators seem to suggest it will, the Republicans won’t even have their used ideology of unchecked markets to run on.

That’s not to say they won’t run on it anyway, but it’s going to afford them less and less traction going forward.

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  • Scopedog

    “Is this a sign that President Obama and the Democratic Party is winning the message war as a whole? Possibly. I think it is.”

    I hope to God (or whatever Deity or reason-based belief system people ascribe to) that this is true. Considering that the Right knows how to “work the refs” when it comes to the media message, and that the Left still does not have a strong enough media to counter it (or is too busy hurling poo at the President), this would be a very good thing.

    Then again, never underestimate President Obama. He has indeed rejected the “government is the problem” mantra of President Reagan.

    In my view, the problem has always been the unregulated capitalism that begun during Reagan’s term and accelerated during President Bush 2′s term. Before that, for at least fifty years, we had regulated capitalism thanks to FDR and Truman. That still did not end the spectrum of poverty, sadly, but it was a hell of a lot fairer than trickle-down economics.

    • holyreality

      Every time I hear the President debunk the Reagan narrative, I applaud, Bravo! clap clap clap.

      The Reagan narrative that government is the problem is a bumpersticker slogan that led us into this whole mess, and must be thoroughly debunked, denied, and condemned as useless dogma.

      Eventually it will become a quaint posterboy of idiotic public sentiment; remember “The rain follows the plow”? Disastrous public policy based on a bumpersticker has done us in before.

      This very heart of the mythology once exposed will bring terror to the true believer. Look at Scientology, some whacky shit for sure but tell the millionaire audit addict that the secret is a sci-fi fairy tale, and see a true believer. There is nothing scarier than a true believer, and false belief must survive, just not as a national policy.