So it appears that we are doomed.
Maybe it won’t be the collapse of civilization (although that is a charming possibility). But at the very least, America is headed for a financial cataclysm.
Is this because Trump insists on pushing through tariffs that are virtually guaranteed to tank the economy, for no discernable reason other than “because I said so”?
Yeah, that’s one factor.
Another issue is that this administration appears to be staffed solely by incompetents, lunatics, dullards, and stooges.
Also, an egomaniacal oligarch and his fellow billionaires are raping the government so they can add another zero at the end of their net-worth calculations.
All of that is true, and the horrific combination is enough to tilt us toward economic Armageddon.
But there is another reason why America will likely be scrounging for pennies and begging for spare change soon. And that is because Republicans are in charge.
Oh sure, you are saying, once more I’m lambasting the GOP and shrieking that they will lead us into ruin.
Actually, I’m not saying that. Historians, economists, and scientists are saying that.
You see, a recent Harvard study analyzed decades of America’s economic performance and assessed the odds of financial outcomes being based on random chance or political choices.
For example, it is a fact that the last five recessions all started under a Republican president. The researchers put the odds of getting that outcome by chance at about 3%.
Let’s keep going. The researchers point out that “a remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president, [and] odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are 0.0098%.”
But wait — it gets crazier. Ten times since World War II, an incumbent from one party handed over the White House to a leader from the other party. In five of the last 10 transitions, a Republican followed a Democrat, and each time the economic growth rate went down. In the other five transitions, a Democrat followed a Republican, and each time the economic growth rate went up. As the researchers point out, this means, “No exceptions. Ten out of ten.”
So when people talk about a Republican inheriting a good economy, messing it up, and then having a Democrat come in to clean up the disaster? Yeah, that’s a real thing. It has literally happened 10 times in a row over the last 80 years.
Again, what are the odds of this happening by chance? The answer is the same odds of flipping heads on 10 coin tosses in a row, which is one out of 1,024. The researchers say the “difference is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.”
What does it say about a political party that is consistently, overwhelmingly wrong on economic policy? What does it say about Americans who continue to vote for that party, generation after generation?
The answers are both disturbing and illuminating. And they likely explain why our country is the richest in the world by many measures, and yet our citizens are far poorer, stressed, and more miserable than just about any other industrialized nation.
So why does the GOP suck so bad at economic policy?
Well, other researchers have theorized that a main reason for this discrepancy is because Democrats, when faced with a financial crisis, will focus more on objective facts and try different approaches to resolve it. Republicans, on the other hand, have exactly one answer for everything: tax cuts for the rich. This is not an exaggeration. Witness the current GOP, which is desperately trying to figure out how to slash Medicaid or Social Security for the express purpose of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which benefitted only the wealthy and did not prevent America from sliding into economic chaos.
Throwing money at billionaires and hoping for the best is the GOP’s only method for boosting the economy, getting out of a recession, and presumably, treating frostbite and losing those last pesky 10 pounds.
This philosophy persists despite mountains of evidence that supply-side economics doesn’t work.
If we think of the economy as an automobile, and the political parties as mechanics, it’s as if the GOP’s fix is to attach square wheels to the car. And they will do this whether the car suffers from a busted engine, a cracked windshield, or an oil leak. It will be square wheels, every time.
The Democratic mechanic, in contrast, will diagnose the issue and try to repair the problem. And they will take the square wheels off the fucking car. And the car will run fine until four years later, when the car’s owner (the American people) will insist that the previous mechanic was better.
We are now entering our latest square-wheel era.
