This may be hard for anyone under age 40 to believe, but at one time in the recent past the Republican Party was the party of ideas. While older generations of Democrats simply repeated nostrums from the 1930s, and younger generations of Democrats chanted slogans from the 1960s, Republicans were examining evidence of what did and did not work, and proposing solutions. And many of those solutions were implemented during the 30 years of Republican political dominance, often with the support or at least acquiescence of Democrats who couldn’t come up with anything better.

Times sure have changed. Some of those Republican/Conservative/Free Market ideas worked as promised. But most others have failed miserably, except as means to redistribute income upward, and from worse off younger generations to older generations that voted Republican, which is NOT what was promised. So, are Republicans examining the evidence and proposing alternatives? Hardly. They are simply saying the same things over and over, but shouting instead of speaking reasonably. I’m not just talking about Tea Party fools, and spinning candidates for office. I’m talking about think tanks and PhD’s, such as R Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw. Those with conservative leanings but open eyes, such as David Frum, are no longer welcome. This isn’t an ideology anymore. It’s a cult. Since they won’t, let’s get in the wayback machine, look at some of the promises, and some of the results.

State and local government employment has been falling, and the propaganda machine has noticed. “There is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it’s not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling.” And why is that? Tax cuts? Republicans in Congress? “Note that a Republican was president after the 1981, 1990 and 2000 recessions. Public-sector austerity looks a lot better to conservatives when they’re out of power than when they’re in it.”

Austerity, huh? So state and local taxes, not just federal taxes, have been falling as a share of the economy? And therefore we deserve less in public services in return? Is that what is going on? I’ve seen several reports implying this is so. But let’s look a little closer at what this austerity constitutes.