By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

The half dozen of you who regularly read this column may have noticed its absence over the past ten weeks. In November, my thumb had a brief but intimate relationship with my table saw.

The docs reattached the severed part. The cast is gone for now, and I can type. I would like to think that I can still poke my thumb in the eyes of the powerful and smug. So I’ll start with the President’s State of the Union speech.

He radiated optimism. But his lack of realism evoked my pessimism.

His prescription for long-term economic health was on target: invest in education, reward entrepreneurship, support emerging industries, reform the tax code, eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. But he was not forthright about the medicine required to restore health.

The nugget that the popular media seized on was his call for a “Sputnik moment.” The Soviets’ successful launch of the world’s first fabricated satellite in October 1957 propelled enormous federal investment in education, research, and development. In his 1961 inaugural address, President Kennedy challenged the nation to put an American on the moon within ten years. We did it in less than nine, while spinning off dozens of commercially successful products.

We are vastly less prepared for such a challenge today, and the leaders of neither party will acknowledge why. From 1951 through 1963, during both Republican and Democratic presidencies, the top marginal tax rate was either 91 percent or 92 percent.

With revenues from that fairer system of taxation, the nation made the infrastructural investments necessary to support long-term economic growth. Government built roads, bridges, dams, electricity generation plants, wastewater treatment facilities, air traffic control systems, and schools. Following Sputnik, government poured money into education.

These kinds of long-term investments produce results that aren’t apparent in the space of one election cycle. But during the 1950s and 1960s the official unemployment rate was a little over four percent, and that was before the Reagan administration redefined unemployment to conceal its true dimensions.

Like Obama, Reagan exuded optimism. He told us that we could slash taxes, give the Pentagon more money than it wanted, and still fuel a thriving economy. He pushed through tax reform that reduced the top marginal rate, first to 50 percent, and then to 28 percent.

His apologists eagerly point out that during his years, jobs grew by a net 16 million. Since most Americans’ notion of history is what happened in popular culture two weeks ago, these ideologues are probably sincere.

They sincerely don’t know that this was the worst job growth of any previous administration since World War II. And they don’t know or don’t acknowledge that this anemic growth was fueled by deficit spending that tripled the national debt that had accumulated over the previous 213 years. During the Bush I years, the top marginal rate dropped to 28 percent and then 31 percent, and the deficit grew to five times what it had been when Reagan took office.

During the Clinton Administration, the highest tax rate increased to 39.6 percent, the economy created 22 million jobs, and we had two balanced budgets. Bush II and the Republican Congress reduced the top rate to 33 percent. During those eight years, the country lost 670,000 jobs.

Politicians whose only talent is to get elected, whose vision for the future extends no further than the next election, keep reciting the slash-taxes-and-stimulate-growth ideology, despite the unequivocal reality that the opposite has been true.

And a sizable majority of Americans buys it. They imagine that an additional $300 per year in their paychecks makes a big difference, while during the tax-slashing Bush II years, average Americans’ income shrank by six percent.

The real winners are the wealthiest. Now we have the greatest income disparity that the nation has seen in 70 years.

The continual disinvestment in America’s infrastructure that began in the Reagan years produces a continual downward spiral for our economic base. Civil engineers spend their lives building and inspecting infrastructure. Their professional association annually rates the condition of everything from aviation facilities to school structures (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/).

Their average grade is a “D.” Their estimate of what it would cost to fix our infrastructure is $2.6 trillion. Rebuilding infrastructure produces jobs that can’t be outsourced overseas, while greatly stimulating our economy and creating a basis for future growth. So does careful investment in education.

Nor does the U.S. have an industrial policy that supports research and development in industries that will create tomorrow’s living wage jobs, as do nations whose economies are accelerating. The ideologues insist that industrial policy is sinful.

At the same time, they support a more costly, defacto industrial policy that provides huge subsidies to such no-growth industries as petroleum, coal, and big agriculture. The large corporations dominating these industries buy the policy that they want, while new-technology entrepreneurs struggle.

The ideologues chant that the wealthy may go on strike and invest their capital elsewhere. But more so than ever, that is happening regardless of tax policy.

Capital goes where its owner can obtain the highest possible return on investment, and the investments in the future are being made elsewhere. Nations that support new industries are already ahead of us in such critical areas as alternative energy, high-speed rail, and, increasingly, biotechnology.

Republicans and many Democrats promote the myth that they can severely reduce federal spending, and that doing so will not only reduce the deficit, but also stimulate economic growth. They embrace the deception that they can accomplish this by cutting from a portion of the budget that amounts to only 10% of total spending. Such reductions would drastically cripple the economy’s ability to grow, and cause great suffering for millions of Americans.

In their annual address to Congress, presidents habitually say that the state of the Union is “strong,” or “sound.” Gerald Ford said that the state of the union was “not good.” Jimmy Carter said something similar. Look where being honest got them.