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My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

This is the second in my two-part interview with Melinda Cooper on her book, Counter-Revolution,

Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance.

We pick up where we left off by discussing the peculiarly southern roots of balanced budget

conservatism and how those politics ultimately merged with supply-side populism in the 1990s,

turbocharging a cycle of Republican tax cuts, spending cuts, and the resulting explosion of the deficit,

leaving a neoliberalized Democratic Party to balance the budget by cutting yet more social spending.

That same neoliberalized Democratic Party worked with those same Republicans to gut welfare,

disciplining labor and suppressing wages so severely that Fed Chair Allen Greenspan

opened the floodgates of easy money, confident that

it would juice the price of assets alone. This was an era when mass homeownership was converted

...