by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Hamilton
Do you read Heather Cox Richardson? She is a political historian who lives in Maine and who, due to down-time caused by a yellow-jacket sting in 2019, started posting daily on Facebook and in “Letters from an American” on the net (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/).
She has what to me is an astonishing grasp of American history and an equally astonishing ability to communicate about it, even to those of us who have always found it mostly boring. Her book “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America” (2020) really caught me, and her “To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party” (2014) is a good lead-up to it.
Russia has just decided to ban her and 499 other Americans from visiting (even if she wanted to), and I’m sure many Americans have been told that she is “a Liberal” and therefore have never read her work. You can be that way if you want to – I certainly avoid some Conservative writers and speakers because they seem to think so very differently from me, but I admit that’s closed-minded.
I’ve long wanted to share a taste of Heather Cox Richardson’s gift, so here is a passage about the money situation in the US from today’s post (not including footnotes):
“[T]he Republicans’ insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which will have added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
“The U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in our tax levies. According to the Center for American Progress, if we taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years we would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If we taxed at the average of European Union nations, we would have an additional $36 trillion.”
I do wish the “Freedom Caucus” in both the US Congress and the Montana State Legislature had a comparable awareness of where we’ve been and where we are now.