How have journalists and academics investigated current themes and Essay

How have journalists and academics investigated current themes and issues in the US presidential elections - Essay Example This research tells that the Presidential elections in the United States generate plenty of interest both within and outside the country.   Ascending into the role of a superpower at the culmination of the Second World War, the US foreign policies have had a significant impact in determining the political and economic success of nations all across the globe.   In this context, the scholarship, reportage and opinion editorials published in the lead up to the elections can reveal the contentious issues and underlying themes.   Such a study will help assess the merits and drawbacks of the American democratic enterprise, which the rest of this essay endeavors to. An issue that is always at the forefront of American politics is domestic economic policy and more importantly the issues of taxes and their expenditure.   In spite of political rhetoric about America being a â€Å"classless society, the statistics don't measure up to this claim. As Paul Krugman points out, â€Å"Thirt y years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits, and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small.... While Roosevelt's New Deal economic and social reforms met with outstanding success, it remains to be seen how the new President would cope with the Wall Street collapse of late. The historical similarities between the two don't end there. They both come from the Democratic Party and as Lichtman points out, piggybacked on a message of "change". And change is all the more imperative now than ever before in the post Second World War American history. For, irrespective of the fact that the country is the richest in the world, the extreme disparities in standard of living among its demography is a symbol of failed economic policies of previous presidents. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, based on statistics released by the Congressional Budget Office, "between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artefact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality" (Lichtman, 2008). While these statistics represent the systemic injustices of the American economic system, which all Democratic Party candidates point to in their campaigns, there is also a dedicated conservative press and its team of scholars, who attempt to discredit blatant realities with ideological rationale. A case in point is the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, which has published articles supporting the reactionary policies of the Republican Party even as the