The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics (Hardcover)

by Jonathan Chait (Author)
Key Phrases: prescription drug bill, capital gains tax cut, top tax rate, Republican Party, White House, New York Times (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The author, a senior editor at the New Republic, is best known for declaring I hate President George W. Bush in 2003. This book traces the roots of his dislike back 30 years, when supply-side economics took over the Republican Party and made cutting taxes the GOP answer to all political and economic questions. American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, Chait declares, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. To which he adds, the Republicans' success at defeating the democratic process explains why it has been able to enact its agenda despite a lack of popular support. The rhetoric is inflammatory, but the case is laid out with clarity. Chait claims that traditional Republicans, religious people and social, fiscal and foreign policy conservatives have been cheated as much as liberals, and that unparalleled corruption and ruthless cynicism in Washington and the timidity of nonpartisan media allow the minority to rule. His analysis should appeal to anyone interested in politics, though many may find the style too irritating to endure. (Sept. 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Chait is both very serious and seriously funny as he traces the rise of conservatism over the past thirty years." --Michael Kinsley

"Jonathan Chait has nailed a large and important story about . . . the bamboozling of America . . . he writes with a mordant wit." --Sean Wilentz

"Jonathan Chait has written a classic of political journalism . . . Prepare to be shocked." --Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Blindside

"Who says economic policy has to be dry? [Chait] brings a lively wit and a limpid style to the topic." --Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor, National Review, and author of The Party of Death

"Agree or not with the author's liberal beliefs, consider this a stimulating analysis of how public policy is formulated today." Kirkus Reviews

"His analysis should appeal to anyone interested in politics" Publishers Weekly

"[If] you're only going to read one book [about what's wrong with the modern Republican Party], this is the one." --Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly

See all Editorial Reviews

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Product Details Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 12, 2007) Language: English ISBN-10: 0618685405 ISBN-13: 978-0618685400 Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #96,159 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in these categories: (What's this?) #63 in  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Levels of Government > Federal Government #86 in  Books > Nonfiction > Politics > Human Rights

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prescription drug bill, capital gains tax cut, top tax rate

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Republican Party, White House, New York Times, Ronald Reagan, The Mainstreaming of Radicalism, The Sum of All Lobbies, Social Security, Bill Clinton, Driving Out the Heretics, Democratic Party, Washington Post, Laffer Curve, The Abuse of Power, Wall Street, National Review, New Deal, Jack Kemp, The Necessity of Deceit, George Bush, President Bush, The Dog That Didn't Watch, Weekly Standard, Conference Committee, Grover Norquist, Washington Times

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24 Reviews 5 star:  (12) 4 star:  (3) 3 star:  (2) 2 star:  (2) 1 star:  (5)           Average Customer Review 3.6 out of 5 stars (24 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 63 of 70 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A great book about an important subject, September 17, 2007 By  Tom L. Huffman (Rockville, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    I am reluctant to give 5 stars to any review, but I succumbed to the temptation in this case simply because for what it does this book is just about as good as it gets. It reminds me somewhat of Paul Krugman's scarily prescient book "Fuzzy Math" that predicted all of the fiscal calamities that followed the enactment of the Bush tax cuts. Chait's book is similar to Fuzzy Math on two counts: first, it offers a sustained, cogent criticism of Bush economic policy; and second, it is extremely well-written. Chait has an admirable ability to make fairly technical subject matter completely clear to a lay audience. He increases readability even more by sprinkling his prose with a healthy dose of humor. I couldn't put the book down, devouring it in a weekend. However, The Big Con has a considerably more ambitious scope than Fuzzy Math, which was essentially limited to an analysis of Bush's 2001 tax cuts. The Big Con focuses upon the entire history of supply-side economics, the philosophy that has, as Chait aptly demonstrates, completely captured the Republican party despite the fact that it has virtually no support among professional economists. If you want to learn something about economic policy while enjoying a thumping good read, I can't recommend a better choice. 52 of 61 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars The Radicalism of the Republican Revolution, October 18, 2007 By  Omer Belsky (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)       The title of Jonathan Chait's book is its worst aspect. It makes him seem like a left wing demagogue, which he isn't. But it does force on him this witty introduction: "I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics - I mean, what's really happening - I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not... so please give me a chance to explain myself when I tell you that American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane" Chait's thesis is hardly novel: In recent decades, the Republican Party has turned a hard right, pulling the entire American political landscape with it. And yet, ironically, the American Public is moving in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly Liberal. One of Chait's main theses is that journalists, including those in leading outlets, don't understand economics. Yet based on his footnotes, most of Chait's Economics, Sociology and History comes from the popular press. He quotes neither official data nor scholarly literature. He consequently makes embarrassing mistakes: minor ones, like claiming that Communists wanted the US to enter WWII before the USSR nonaggression pact with Germany, which was actually signed before the war's outbreak (p. 259). Substantial ones, too: he misconstrues the story of the Supreme Court confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Chait sometimes applies a single label (predominantly "Conservatives") to refer to different groups with different agendas: Libertarians, K-Street Lobbyists, Bush Cronies, etc. And I suspect that at least some of the economic data he offers can be differently interpreted. And yet... even if Chait isn't right about everything, I think the picture he paints is essentially correct and disturbing. Since the 1970s, the GOP changed from a moderate party committed to smaller government and balanced budgets to an extremist faction wedded to a socially conservative ideology that few Americans support, and to an economic agenda that virtually none do: Not merely extreme tax cutting, but Corporate well-fare, massive corruption, and a bigger, not smaller government. How did that happen? Mainly because of the new constituency of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican Party, like the Democrats, had a large constituency, with different interests and ideologies. In classic Madisonian fashion, these various factions and interests mostly balanced each other out: corruption and partisanship were checked by the need not to alienate parts of the delicate conservative coalition. But the contemporary Republican Party constitutes several tribes with remarkably different goals. The Social conservatives care almost exclusively about so called "moral issues"; the foreign policy hawks about US military preparedness. Skillfully, the small (but moneyed) corporate-well-fare tail managed to wag the economically indifferent dog. Because Social and Hawkish Conservatives don't really care about economics, they don't moderate the Republican Party economically. Without significant competing economic interests to please, the Republicans lined up behind its two major economic initiatives: Tax Cuts and Corporate hands-out. And they found a new and powerful weapon: the business lobbies. Traditionally, the business lobbies were fairly unpartisan; they joined interests in both parties to promote their goals as the case demanded. But because each party's positions would shift according to its internal politics, they did not remain committed to any one party. This, says Chait, changed in the 1990s: "when Republican won control of Congress... they set about to reshape [The Lobbies] as a partisan Republican force... Republicans demanded total loyalty from [the Lobbies] and offered total loyalty in return. The business lobby and the GOP would no longer be separate parties with overlapping interests but partners in an ironclad alliance" (p. 56). The Republican commitment to rabid tax cutting and crony Capitalism faced a serious problem: the majority of the American people do not support those policies. Most Americans support taxing progressively, balancing the budget, and oppose privatizing Social Security. This is where the "Big Con" comes in: how did the Republicans manage to enact their agenda against a potentially hostile public opinion? Essentially, Chait claim, they did it by lying. Instead of proclaiming their economic agenda, they concealed it: the rationale for the Bush tax cuts kept changing; the extent of its regresivity suppressed; and cronyist policies were disguised by Orwellian renaming: a timber hand out was "the Healthy Forest Initiative"; pollution became the "Clear Sky Act". (Full Disclosure: these are complicated issues, and I am not suggesting anyone take me, or Mr. Chait, as a final authority on them. But I think the general picture is telling). The Republicans encountered little opposition from the press. Institutionally geared towards "balance" and generally ignorant of economics, environmental science, and the like, the press fell easily into the kind of stories the Republican wanted, stating implicitly that the truth was on both sides and that the Democrats were no better then the republican. It played into the hands of republicans by focusing on the politicians' "character" rather than agendas, and by bestowing equal credibility on both sides. As Paul Krugman famously put it, if the white house were to declare that the Earth was flat, newspapers' headlines would be "Shape of the Earth: Opinions Defer". But Chait fails to explain why the Republicans advantage in press manipulation: Democrats are on general more educated and media savvy. if Britain's Tony Blair could out spin the best of his rivals, why can't US democrats? I think Chait underemphasizes the widespread feeling that in the 1970s, America veered too far to the left. In the 1990s, as Bill Clinton acknowledged, even Democrats became "Eisenhower Republicans" (p. 234). The radicalization of the Right may be mostly an over-compensation. For there are limits to the Republican Revolution: the failure to significantly restrict Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The major edifice of the New Deal seem to have survived the onslaught of the Radical Republicans. Perhaps the Big Con isn't so big, after all 46 of 60 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing the right's intellectual vacuum, September 5, 2007 By  Curtis Daddy Love "not fooled" (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    It's a pretty good book. Those who think that conservative economic policies are well-supported by some kind of professional consensus among economists will be shocked, shocked to learn that on at least one of the key elements of Republican Party economic policy thinking -- their obsession with cutting taxes -- the ideas being put forward to justify it by the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, and all the rest are crackpot economic notions that are being mainstreamed only by virtue of (what else?) relentless message discipline. These same crackpots (and presumably liars) would have you believe that returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that sound education policy requires expended tax breaks for rich people, and so on. Um, wrong on the facts, wrong according to the ACTUAL consensus.		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 1.0 out of 5 stars It's The Big Con, all right! This book, that is! To provide a hint as to were the author's political bent is, consider the following quotes- "The notion of punishing the rich is alien to the modern... Read more Published 1 month ago by Gary M. Hetrick 5.0 out of 5 stars More than an economic con I have just one minor criticism of this book: the subtitle, "The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Read more Published 13 months ago by Dennis Littrell 5.0 out of 5 stars A good place to start This book is a good place to start to understand the late 20th century's emergence of the conservative movement and it's fortunate partnership with social conservatives and... Read more Published 14 months ago by Karl R. Neice 2.0 out of 5 stars only read the first chapter I actually put this book aside after having gotten about 75% of the way through it, something I rarely do. Read more Published 14 months ago by Caraculiambro 4.0 out of 5 stars The Cult of Tax Cutting George W. Bush's economic plan can be summed up in two words... cut taxes. In a 2008 interview Bush mentioned that his administration had a `strong-dollar' policy. Read more Published 15 months ago by E. David Swan 5.0 out of 5 stars if only it were fiction. The events described in this book are so bizzare as to almost defy belief. Unfortunaly, it's all true. Read more Published 15 months ago by Richard Laughlin 5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written study of minority rule in the USA In this brilliantly-written book, Jonathan Chait, senior editor at the New Republic, shows simply and lucidly how a tightly knit group of politically and economically motivated... Read more Published 17 months ago by William Podmore 1.0 out of 5 stars The BIG CON is this book He starts with an unsupportable belief, then tries to "prove" it as a fact by lies, innuendo, and the re-writing and re-interpreting of history. Read more Published 18 months ago by J. A. Olson 4.0 out of 5 stars A matter of one's politics I suspect that most people would like or dislike "The Big Con" based on their political persuasion. There is no question but that Jonathan Chait has written an entertaining and... Read more Published 18 months ago by trainreader 1.0 out of 5 stars No Understanding of Economics I read this book hoping to find a treasure trove of sound liberal arguments for higher taxes and a bibliography of sources for back up information. What a disappointment. Read more Published 19 months ago by EWC Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618685405
• ISBN-13: 978-0618685400
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #96,159 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #63 in	Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Levels of Government > Federal Government
  #86 in	Books > Nonfiction > Politics > Human Rights

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book about an important subject, September 17, 2007

By	Tom L. Huffman (Rockville, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am reluctant to give 5 stars to any review, but I succumbed to the temptation in this case simply because for what it does this book is just about as good as it gets.

It reminds me somewhat of Paul Krugman's scarily prescient book "Fuzzy Math" that predicted all of the fiscal calamities that followed the enactment of the Bush tax cuts.

Chait's book is similar to Fuzzy Math on two counts: first, it offers a sustained, cogent criticism of Bush economic policy; and second, it is extremely well-written. Chait has an admirable ability to make fairly technical subject matter completely clear to a lay audience. He increases readability even more by sprinkling his prose with a healthy dose of humor. I couldn't put the book down, devouring it in a weekend.

However, The Big Con has a considerably more ambitious scope than Fuzzy Math, which was essentially limited to an analysis of Bush's 2001 tax cuts. The Big Con focuses upon the entire history of supply-side economics, the philosophy that has, as Chait aptly demonstrates, completely captured the Republican party despite the fact that it has virtually no support among professional economists.

If you want to learn something about economic policy while enjoying a thumping good read, I can't recommend a better choice.

52 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Radicalism of the Republican Revolution, October 18, 2007

By	Omer Belsky (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The title of Jonathan Chait's book is its worst aspect. It makes him seem like a left wing demagogue, which he isn't. But it does force on him this witty introduction:

"I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics - I mean, what's really happening - I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not... so please give me a chance to explain myself when I tell you that American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane"

Chait's thesis is hardly novel: In recent decades, the Republican Party has turned a hard right, pulling the entire American political landscape with it. And yet, ironically, the American Public is moving in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly Liberal.

One of Chait's main theses is that journalists, including those in leading outlets, don't understand economics. Yet based on his footnotes, most of Chait's Economics, Sociology and History comes from the popular press. He quotes neither official data nor scholarly literature.

He consequently makes embarrassing mistakes: minor ones, like claiming that Communists wanted the US to enter WWII before the USSR nonaggression pact with Germany, which was actually signed before the war's outbreak (p. 259). Substantial ones, too: he misconstrues the story of the Supreme Court confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Chait sometimes applies a single label (predominantly "Conservatives") to refer to different groups with different agendas: Libertarians, K-Street Lobbyists, Bush Cronies, etc. And I suspect that at least some of the economic data he offers can be differently interpreted.

And yet... even if Chait isn't right about everything, I think the picture he paints is essentially correct and disturbing.

Since the 1970s, the GOP changed from a moderate party committed to smaller government and balanced budgets to an extremist faction wedded to a socially conservative ideology that few Americans support, and to an economic agenda that virtually none do: Not merely extreme tax cutting, but Corporate well-fare, massive corruption, and a bigger, not smaller government.

How did that happen? Mainly because of the new constituency of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican Party, like the Democrats, had a large constituency, with different interests and ideologies. In classic Madisonian fashion, these various factions and interests mostly balanced each other out: corruption and partisanship were checked by the need not to alienate parts of the delicate conservative coalition.

But the contemporary Republican Party constitutes several tribes with remarkably different goals. The Social conservatives care almost exclusively about so called "moral issues"; the foreign policy hawks about US military preparedness. Skillfully, the small (but moneyed) corporate-well-fare tail managed to wag the economically indifferent dog. Because Social and Hawkish Conservatives don't really care about economics, they don't moderate the Republican Party economically.

Without significant competing economic interests to please, the Republicans lined up behind its two major economic initiatives: Tax Cuts and Corporate hands-out. And they found a new and powerful weapon: the business lobbies.

Traditionally, the business lobbies were fairly unpartisan; they joined interests in both parties to promote their goals as the case demanded. But because each party's positions would shift according to its internal politics, they did not remain committed to any one party. This, says Chait, changed in the 1990s: "when Republican won control of Congress... they set about to reshape [The Lobbies] as a partisan Republican force... Republicans demanded total loyalty from [the Lobbies] and offered total loyalty in return. The business lobby and the GOP would no longer be separate parties with overlapping interests but partners in an ironclad alliance" (p. 56).

The Republican commitment to rabid tax cutting and crony Capitalism faced a serious problem: the majority of the American people do not support those policies. Most Americans support taxing progressively, balancing the budget, and oppose privatizing Social Security.

This is where the "Big Con" comes in: how did the Republicans manage to enact their agenda against a potentially hostile public opinion? Essentially, Chait claim, they did it by lying. Instead of proclaiming their economic agenda, they concealed it: the rationale for the Bush tax cuts kept changing; the extent of its regresivity suppressed; and cronyist policies were disguised by Orwellian renaming: a timber hand out was "the Healthy Forest Initiative"; pollution became the "Clear Sky Act". (Full Disclosure: these are complicated issues, and I am not suggesting anyone take me, or Mr. Chait, as a final authority on them. But I think the general picture is telling).

The Republicans encountered little opposition from the press. Institutionally geared towards "balance" and generally ignorant of economics, environmental science, and the like, the press fell easily into the kind of stories the Republican wanted, stating implicitly that the truth was on both sides and that the Democrats were no better then the republican. It played into the hands of republicans by focusing on the politicians' "character" rather than agendas, and by bestowing equal credibility on both sides. As Paul Krugman famously put it, if the white house were to declare that the Earth was flat, newspapers' headlines would be "Shape of the Earth: Opinions Defer".

But Chait fails to explain why the Republicans advantage in press manipulation: Democrats are on general more educated and media savvy. if Britain's Tony Blair could out spin the best of his rivals, why can't US democrats?

I think Chait underemphasizes the widespread feeling that in the 1970s, America veered too far to the left. In the 1990s, as Bill Clinton acknowledged, even Democrats became "Eisenhower Republicans" (p. 234). The radicalization of the Right may be mostly an over-compensation.

For there are limits to the Republican Revolution: the failure to significantly restrict Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The major edifice of the New Deal seem to have survived the onslaught of the Radical Republicans. Perhaps the Big Con isn't so big, after all

46 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing the right's intellectual vacuum, September 5, 2007

By	Curtis Daddy Love "not fooled" (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's a pretty good book. Those who think that conservative economic policies are well-supported by some kind of professional consensus among economists will be shocked, shocked to learn that on at least one of the key elements of Republican Party economic policy thinking -- their obsession with cutting taxes -- the ideas being put forward to justify it by the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, and all the rest are crackpot economic notions that are being mainstreamed only by virtue of (what else?) relentless message discipline. These same crackpots (and presumably liars) would have you believe that returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that sound education policy requires expended tax breaks for rich people, and so on. Um, wrong on the facts, wrong according to the ACTUAL consensus.