Home > Work > Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
21 " also trying to act in good faith and also becoming useful idiots for big business and the rich. Another of them was Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard superstar who became the new president’s chief economic adviser—but only nominally, because Reagan ignored him. Feldstein actually hated deficits, as true conservatives did, and called his supply-side colleagues “extremists.” Stockman’s chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget—who left in 1983 to earn a fortune on Wall Street, then become a cocaine addict and TV pundit—said that Feldstein “has failed at making the transition from academic economist to political economist.” That was thirty-six-year-old Larry Kudlow, defining political economist to mean not an expert on political economics but an economist willing and eager to dissemble and lie to suit his political masters, thirty-five years before he returned to government work as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
22 " Asked in a class in the late 1970s at Harvard Business School about a hypothetical CEO who discovers his product could kill customers, young Jeff Skilling said he “would keep making and selling the product. My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the shareholders. It’s the government’s job to step in if a product is dangerous. "
23 " Libertarians fantasize that they’re action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it on their own and that unfair disadvantages either don’t exist or can’t be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians—94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger—has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies. "
24 " How much do companies use buybacks to fool shareholders and the markets about the actual health and prospects of their companies? How much do executives, each being paid with stock and options worth millions and sometimes hundreds of millions, use buybacks simply to enrich themselves? "
25 " If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger. "
26 " The top income tax rate for the wealthiest was cut from 70 to 50 percent in 1982. It would’ve been prudent to stop there for a while and see how that worked out. But no: in the second Reagan term, the top rate was cut again to 38.5 percent, then once more to 28 percent—along with a large reduction of the income threshold for the highest bracket, which meant that somebody making $1 million or $10 million a year would now be taxed at the same rate that a teacher or plumber was taxed on everything they earned above the equivalent of $40,000. "
27 " oppose net tax increases,” “any and all” of them, for as long as they’re in office. "
28 " age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official. "
29 " Norquist’s stroke of evil genius was to dream up at age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official. "
30 " Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), funded over the years by the familiar (Koch, Olin, Scaife) right-wing foundations. "
31 " averages: a few times I’ve been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person’s net worth in those rooms "
32 " If you’re young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new, the sci-fi writer and futurist William Gibson says, “I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. "
33 " A note on averages: a few times I’ve been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person’s net worth in those rooms was nearly $1 billion. "
34 " According to the health-efficiency index compiled by Bloomberg News, which combines longevity and healthcare spending into a single metric for almost every country, the United States is second from the bottom, better only than Bulgaria. "
35 " As one of those scholars recently summarized the corpus of studies and experiments, the more that change “makes people anxious about the world and their place in it” and causes “major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives,” then “the more they longed nostalgically…for the comparative safety and security of a perceived past. "
36 " From the 1940s through the ’70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled. "
37 " Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—“to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. "
38 " And while I still resist defaulting to conspiracist explanations, pieces of this story do look and swim and walk and quack an awful lot like ducks—that is, resemble a well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else. "
39 " Powell proposed waging this war on four fronts—in academia, the media, politics, and the legal system—and doing so with unheard-of budgets and ferocity. "
40 " Of the 100 groups that spend the most, 95 mainly represent business interests, and of the 20 biggest spenders of all, 19 are corporations or business groups, dominated by finance and healthcare. None are unions. The ugly, corrupting frenzy that the Reagan administration unleashed in 1981 and that ostensibly stunned its budget director—“Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level just got out of control”—never stopped. "