Those of us who were alive and sentient 20 years ago remember exactly where we were when we saw the twin towers collapse and heard that other planes went down. 

Some of us are old enough to remember exactly where we were when we heard, many years before, that JFK had been shot and killed. 

I expect that most young people today, who have no direct memory of either, will continue to remember 1/6/21, when a president of the United States instigated a deadly attack on the Capitol. 

Dark days like these become etched in our memories. But more important is how these days altered history and changed our lives permanently, and what lessons we as a nation drew from them.

11/22/63 made Lyndon Johnson president, which led to the tragic escalation of the Vietnam War. 

9/11/01 motivated Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to launch a 20-year war on terrorism. 

1/6/21 marked the culmination of Trump’s attempted coup, and perhaps the start of something far worse. 

All of these days now provoke the standard sentiments from politicians that “our hearts go out” to the families of those who perished. Yes, of course. 

But I wish these grim anniversaries also invited more consideration of what America has become as a result – war-prone, fearful, and deeply divided. 

Does Trickle-Down Economics Actually Work?

To the extent the Republican Party has any economic platform at all, it’s trickle-down economics. Unfortunately for the GOP, it’s based on three giant myths. It’s time to debunk them once and for all.

Myth #1: Tax cuts for corporations and the rich create more and better jobs. 

Wrong. Corporations used Trump’s giant tax cut to buy back shares of their own stock and boost share prices. From 2017 to 2018, stock buybacks increased by a staggering 50 percent. Lowe’s spent $10 billion on stock buybacks in 2018, and then fired thousands of workers with no notice or severance. Walmart and AT&T also laid off thousands of workers. 

And contrary to the claim that the tax cut would boost wages by $4,000 a year, a recent analysis found that in the year after the Trump tax cut, wages increased by about the same as they did before it, and then slowed. 

Tax cuts for rich individuals don’t trickle down, either. The rich simply get richer. Two years before Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned less than 23 percent of the nation’s wealth. A decade later, after two rounds of tax cuts for the rich, they owned over 28 percent. By 2019, after more tax cuts for the rich by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, people at the top owned almost 35 percent of America’s wealth. Meanwhile, average wealth barely budged for the middle class, and went negative for the bottom 10 percent.

It gets worse. During this pandemic alone, America’s 664 billionaires have added $1.3 trillion to their collective wealth and now own over $4 trillion. That’s almost double the wealth of the bottom half  — 165 million Americans.

But nothing has trickled down. Even before the pandemic, wages stagnated.

Myth #2: Tax cuts for big corporations and the rich spur economic growth.

Baloney. Not even Ronald Reagan’s surging economic growth rate was driven by tax cuts. It was driven by low interest rates and humongous government spending. 

George W. Bush promised his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would pay for themselves (sound familiar?) by spurring economic growth. That didn’t happen. A 2017 study led by one of Bush’s former chief economists found that the tax cuts had no significant effect on growth. In fact, growth declined, slowing to just 2.8 percent from over 3 percent during the Clinton years. The economic expansion under Bush was one of the weakest expansions since World War II.

Donald Trump claimed his tax cut would be like “rocket fuel” for the economy, and would spur annual growth of 3 percent. After its first year, growth slowed to 1.9  percent.

Finally, a recent study analyzing tax data spanning 50 years from 18 advanced economies found that tax cuts for the rich only benefited the rich and had no effect on job creation or economic growth. I, for one, am shocked.

Myth #3: Deregulation spurs economic growth.

More rubbish. The cost savings from deregulation go to corporate executives and major investors, while the costs and risks land on the rest of us. 

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rolled back regulations on everything from clean air and water standards to dangerous chemicals in products — benefiting chemical and fossil fuel executives and investors while forcing everyone else to deal with polluted air and toxins. 

His Labor Department loosened child labor laws and scaled back the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. Companies raked in savings, while workers were exploited. 

And with the help of Congress, he rolled back banking regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis — to the benefit of rich Wall Streeters and the detriment of everyone else.

Don’t forget Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory agenda allowed for-profit healthcare companies to flourish, contributing to the out-of-control health care costs we’re saddled with today. And that deregulation of the financial sector was a major cause of the 2008 crash, as it allowed banks to make risky bets.

In other words, the Republican trickle-down claim that deregulation helps us all is baloney. Regulations that protect you and me from being harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services are clearly worth the cost.

So don’t fall for trickle-down nonsense. Making big corporations and the rich even richer through tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks doesn’t make the rest of us better off. It just makes big corporations and the rich even richer.

There is nothing Republicans would rather the American people forget more than George W. Bush, who doesn’t even have a bit-part at the GOP convention opening in Tampa. 

But W’s ghost may be there, anyway.

The National Weather Service says tropical storm Isaac is now heading for New Orleans, and Isaac is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall  late Monday or early Tuesday.

Isaac is very likely to revive memories of the Bush administration’s monumental incompetence in dealing with the needs of Americans caught in Hurricane Katrina.

And if the public remembers the Bush administration’s incompetence with Katrina, they may also recall the Bush administration’s incompetence and its lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – which led us into that devastating war.

And the public may recall how George W. Bush took the $5 trillion surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed to him and turned it into a $6 trillion budget deficit by slashing taxes, mostly on the rich, and by creating an expensive new Medicare drug benefit that helped drug companies more than it helped seniors.

The public might even recall how the Bush administration tried not to see what Wall Street was up to when the Street went on a rampage of risky bets, and then, when Wall Street was about to melt down, pushed Congress into approving a no-strings bailout – both of which cost the nation billions more.

Indeed, we’re still living with George W. Bush’s legacy – the last Republican to occupy the White House – which is a truth that Romney is desperate to put out of our minds. He wants to blame the bad economy, and most of everything else, on Obama. 

The GOP was intent on not even bringing up Bush’s name at the GOP convention, because the former president might also remind Americans how little the Republicans care about average Americans, like those caught in Hurricane Katrina, and how much they care about top corporate and Wall Street executives, like those being entertained in Tampa.

But Hurricane Isaac seems likely to remind Americans anyway.

Let us hope and pray Isaac doesn’t cause the disaster of Katrina. We can at least be confident that the Obama administration will respond as the Bush administration didn’t.

But the split screen on the TV newscasts – part GOP convention, part Hurricane Isaac bashing into the Gulf Coast – may nonetheless pose a public-relations disaster for the GOP.

As Bill Clinton is resurrected by the Democrats, George W. Bush is being erased by the GOP – as if an entire eight years of American history hadn’t happened.

 While Bill Clinton stumps for Obama, Romney has gone out of his way not to mention the name of the president who came after Clinton and before Obama.

 Clinton will have a starring role at the Democratic National Convention. George W. Bush won’t even be at the Republican one – the first time a national party has not given the stage at its convention to its most recent occupant of the Oval Office who successfully ran for reelection.

The GOP is counting on America’s notoriously short-term memory to blot out the last time the nation put a Republican into the Oval Office, on the reasonable assumption that such a memory might cause voters to avoid making the same mistake twice. As whoever-it-was once said, “fool me once …” (and then mangled the rest).

 Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.

Besides, the resemblances between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are too close for comfort. Both were born into wealth, sons of prominent politicians who themselves ran for president; both are closely tied to the nation’s corporate and financial elites, and eager to do their bidding; both are socially awkward and, as candidates, tightly scripted for fear of saying something they shouldn’t; and both presented themselves to the nation devoid of any consistent policies or principles that might give some clue as to what they actually believe.

 They are both, in other words, unusually shallow, uncurious, two-dimensional men who ran or are running for the presidency for no clear reason other than to surpass their fathers or achieve the aims and ambitions of their wealthy patrons.

 Small wonder the Republican Party wants us to forget our last Republican president and his administration. By contrast, the Democrats have every reason for America to recall and celebrate the Clinton years.