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Keep
celebrities from making political speeches
After
the Daily Forty-Niner’s own Gerry
Wachovsky called on celebrities to stop
talking about politics I found that for
the first time I agree with him.
Not
because Hollywood liberals are necessarily
wrong, though.
Wachovsky’s
piece is full of non-sequiturs and can only
convince one who has no knowledge of recent
history. What history tells us is that it’s
conservative celebrities who are wrong and,
more importantly, get to have real power.
Let me give you examples.
Most
prominently there was Ronald Reagan. To
his credit he worked on arms control and
supported the Mudjaheddin in Afghanistan,
which eventually triggered the collapse
of the Soviet Union. But he also gave us
an intellectual legacy that doesn’t
deserve the label “intellectual”
at all.
Reagan
believed in supply-side economics, a hypothesis
by which cutting taxes would lead to higher
tax revenue. It didn’t, and serious
people knew it wouldn’t. As vice president,
George Bush Sr. coined the phrase “Voodoo
Economics.” But after a very deep
recession engineered by the Federal Reserve
to bring inflation down, the economy bounced
back.
That
was not the result of tax cuts, but the
normal business cycle. When conservatives
talk about it, you hear about the “seven
fat years.”
What
people who worship Reagan and tax cuts forget
is that average growth during the ’80s
was less than that of the ’90s and
even the ’70s. You have to be very
picky about the time frame to believe that
Reagan’s policies worked.
And
Reagan left a legacy of deregulation that
hasn’t been successful either. In
fact, it was devastating. Most costly was
the savings and loan crisis, which could
have cost about $10 billion to fix when
Reagan took office. Instead, Reagan’s
deregulation led to a large number of bank
failures. The cost was kept off the books,
but the estimates are about $250 billion,
some even say $400 billion.
There
was another entertainer who left a legacy.
We are too young to remember, but Sonny
Bono, former husband of Cher, gave us the
perpetual copyright. To be fair, the constitution
doesn’t allow copyright without time
limits. But in 2003 the basic copyright
was extended from 50 to 70 years after an
author’s death. And because an extension
for 20 more years is not limitless, the
Supreme Court will not strike it down.
We
also have the Governator. I remember him
telling us that children and seniors need
to be taken care of and that it was an outrage
that our fees went up by 40 percent in one
year. His funding for education is below
Proposition 98’s minimum. He cut health
services for the elderly poor and children.
All after telling us he’d start a
marketing campaign signing more eligible
people up for state health care.
And
when did he end the “crazy deficit
spending?” We are still waiting. The
only promise (and there were many, most
egregiously the one about special interest
fundraising) he hasn’t broken is the
one on taxes. He took away the right of
counties to certain property taxes (car
tax) and is trying to get local government
to pay for state expenditures, but local
government doesn’t have the money?
The
real problem is that the public loves celebrities.
That’s why it is so lucrative for
charities to hire celebrities as spokespeople.
Actors get to testify to Congress about
topics handled in their latest work (I’m
sure they are informed, but that doesn’t
make them experts).
So,
by all means, keep Hollywood people out
of politics. But it is important to understand
that Republicans get to do real damage,
and Democrats don’t.
Wolf
Thiele is a single subject teaching credential
student at CSULB.
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