The American Prospect
by Matthew Yglesias

01/03/06

It was the year of the dogs that didn't bark. A newly dominant Republican Party was supposed to use its position to simultaneously transform American public policy and render the Democrats a permanently irrelevant minority party, isolated in a few coastal enclaves. It didn't happen. And, in fact, it started to unravel almost right away. The Bush administration went for broke with its plan to end Social Security as we know it and instead move to a system of individual stock ownership. The pretty version of how this was supposed to play into the Republican quest for a perpetual majority was that privatization would create a larger 'investor class' of stockowners, people who, in virtue of their shares, identified with corporate managers rather than workers or consumers, and therefore supported conservative economic policies. More prosaically, privatization was simply the latest iteration of GOP money-in, money-out machine politics...

http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=10793


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp