When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Frugal Ron predicted Trump would lead us into a recession. Frugal Ron also predicted Trump would dramatically increase the unemployment rate, stymie job growth, rack up record percent annual spending increases, create record government spending deficits and increase our trade deficit. As it turned out, Trump didn’t disappoint.
So, is Frugal Ron some kind of genius? Not hardly.
Frugal Ron studies history, something Republicans don’t do. He also learned history repeats itself for people who fail to study history and learn from it.
It was easy to predict Trump would follow Republican dogma in his fiscal management. The results were equally predictable. We’ve seen it over and over with Republicans.
Before understanding why Republican economies fail, it is important to understand their record over time using various measures. Note: While Congress theoretically controls government spending and taxation, in the real world, the president sends a proposed budget to Congress. Members of Congress typically declare the budget “dead on arrival”. However, because the president has final veto power and there is only one president and 435 House members and 100 senators, the final budget the president gets is usually very close to what he proposed.
Recessions
No one is as predictable at creating recessions as Republican presidents. In the last 100 years, 13 of the last 17 recessions have taken place when a Republican occupied the White House. It gets even more worse when looking at the data since 1953. In that period, 10 of the 11 recessions occurred while a Republican was president. I’m not doing a statistical analysis, but we can assume there is more than random chance at work here.
The lesson here is if you are a business owner, especially one with limited cash reserves, DO NOT start a new business or a major expansion if a Republican is president or about to take office!
Job growth
Measuring job growth accurately and comparing it across presidential administrations over an 85-year period requires some effort. Looking at just the number of new jobs created does not tell us much because there were a lot fewer workers in the 1940’s. Adding an average 97,000 new workers a month like Truman did was a Herculean feat as World War II was ending. Those numbers now would be considered a failure.
Also, presidents have different term lengths. In the graph below, I used Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data and calculated the change in job numbers from the start to the end of each administration. Then I calculated the percent change in jobs from the start to the end of each term. Last step, I divide the percent change in jobs by the term length of each president in years. The final numbers you see in the graph are the annual percent change in jobs during each president’s term. One last detail, BLS started collecting this data in January, 1939. This means only the last five years of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s term are included.
As far as performance by political party, of the eight presidents with the highest job growth, seven are Democrats. Of the seven presidents with the lowest job growth, only one is a Democrat. Again, pretty hard to argue this is due to chance.
No matter what metric one uses to measure job growth, one fact is undeniable. Donald Trump is the only president since these records were kept in 1939 with negative job growth in his term.
Republicans are in a league of their own based on their audacity in spinning the truth. Even though COVID claimed over 1.1 million US lives, Republicans continually call COVID a hoax. Yet, when confronted with Trump’s disastrous economic record, suddenly, COVID was a once in a century pandemic. The reality is, COVID was a once in a century pandemic, made much worse in the US because of Donald Trump’s mismanagement. That mismanagement is reflected throughout measuring Trump’s economic performance.
When we cherry pick Trump’s data in his favor by knocking 2020 (the pandemic year) out of the dataset, things go from disastrous to mediocre. During Trump’s first 36 months in office, the US economy gained 6.6 million jobs. But during a comparable 36-month period at the end of Obama’s tenure, employers added 8.1 million jobs, or 23% more than were added in Trump’s first three years in office. And, if you look at the chart above, Obama isn’t the president you want to lose out comparing to. A better comparison, in Joe Biden’s first 36 months in office, 14.7 million new jobs were created.
Republicans claim their tax cuts create jobs, The above graph disproves that fantasy. Trump’s corporate tax cuts are an excellent example. Corporations took the money they saved on taxes and did stock buy-backs, paid down debt and padded their bottom lines. As the above paragraph showed, job growth in Trump’s cherry picked first three years was mediocre.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency is interesting. In this and other economic performance graphs and tables below, Reagan is the only Republican matching up with top tier Democrats. While he had two recessions while in office, his end of term performance was very good.
There are a few possible explanations for Reagan’s success:
- Reagan may be an outlier.
- Some unexplained factor or chance made him successful even though he followed Republican dogma.
- Reagan’s extreme liberal borrow and spend policies kept the economy afloat until George H.W Bush took office and the typical Republican recession took hold.
Looking at the graph again, certainly, there are other factors at work. From 1939 until Roosevelt died in 1945, the US put record numbers of people to work building an industrial behemoth to win World War II. On the other end of the spectrum, the Bush II recession destroyed $9.8 trillion in wealth as home values plummeted and retirement accounts vaporized just as Obama was taking office. U.S. home mortgage debt relative to GDP increased from an average of 46% during the 1990s to 73% during 2008, While Obama’s numbers in this and other charts don’t look great, after assuming office in 2009, he accomplished yeoman’s work in keeping the economy from going even further into free-fall. At the end, he actually created substantial numbers of jobs.
Economic growth
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States (without double counting the intermediate goods and services used up to produce them). Changes in GDP are how economic growth is measured.
This graph looks like the Job Growth graphic above. Of the seven presidents with the highest economic growth rates, six are Democrats. Of the nine presidents with the worst growth records, seven are Republicans. Herbert Hoover’s Percent Annual GDP change was -253.9%. Including his numbers made the graph unreadable, so I left them off, but include him in the above analysis. The first full year of GDP data collection was 1929. That was the first full year of Hoover’s presidency.
Put in more understandable terms, a study by two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found, “Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republican. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades.” Their study was done before Biden had an economic record and also does not include Hoover’s data . https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opinion/sunday/democrats-economy.html
Spending
The important column to pay attention to in this table is the “Percent Annual Change”. The rest are just support information. Democrats Clinton and Obama grew government spending at about 1/3 the level of the Republicans. Biden has decreased annual government spending substantially since taking office.
For this table, and the ones following, I’m focusing on the more recent past. I’m starting with Ronald Reagan because he took spending and deficits to a whole new level never seen in peacetime. This from a guy that complained, “Government isn’t the answer, it is the problem”. I guess Reagan’s solution was to make the problem much bigger.
Again, I cherry picked Trump’s data to remove the impact of his mismanagement of COVID. Between Trump’s first and second and second and third years in office, Trump doubled the percent increase in government spending that Democrats Clinton and Obama maintained. In Trump’s last year, he exploded the percent increase in spending to a level not seen since World War II.
This table drives a stake in the heart of the fantasy that Republicans are fiscal conservatives. Republicans love big government. Republicans spend and spend and then spend some more.
Deficits
Let’s do some basic math. If government increases spending dramatically and at the same time cuts revenue by giving big tax cuts to rich people, what is going to happen to net income? Republicans just can’t figure this one out and they keep getting the same results, bigger and bigger deficits. Trump is even campaigning on more tax cuts. He should break his all-time record deficit if elected to a second term.
The important columns to pay attention to are “Annual Change ($billions)” and “Percent Change”. You will notice every Democrat has decreased the deficit during their term in office. Every Republican has increased the deficit. Percent changes are equally telling. The crazy number Bush II has is due to the math of doing a percentage change and going from a positive balance to a deeply negative one.
For every president, as far as spending and deficits, their first year in office is basically a reflection on their predecessor. Most spending and revenue was set in the previous budget before they took office. Obama left Trump with a first year spending balance of -$574 billion. By the next year, Trump increased the deficit to -$987 billion, In Trump’s next year in office, he increased the deficit to -$1.15 trillion. Both the -$987 and the -$1.15 trillion were the largest non-recession deficits in US history. In Trump’s last year in office, the deficit exploded to -$3.2 trillion, an all time record. Trump’s mismanagement of COVID was the primary reason massive deficits were needed to rescue the economy in his last year in office.
Trump increased the federal spending deficit every year he was in office and concluded with an all-time record deficit. Anyone who thinks Trump will cut our government deficit if re-elected needs a dose of reality.
Reagan’s $210 billion deficit in 2008 seems paltry by today’s standards. It was 17.2 percent of total federal government spending and 3.8 percent of GDP. Biden’s most recent annual deficit of $1.194 trillion is 19.2 percent of spending and 4.6 percent of GDP. Both deficits are far bigger than they should be. But, not a lot different compared to overall federal government spending and GDP.
The data clearly shows, tax cuts to rich people do not pay for themselves. When a Republican says they are going to cut taxes, what they really mean is they are going to create deficits. The tables above on Job Creation and the table below illustrate that tax cuts certainly do not help the economy. Tax cuts for rich people make rich people richer and create deficits for our grandchildren to pay off. Conversely, Democrat’s tax increases do lower deficits.
One last point, you can take the BEA data and compare spending and deficits from the end of the previous president’s term to the end of each term, you can compare each as a percent of GDP, use inflation adjusted inflation values or do the comparisons in the above two tables anyway you want. What you’ll find, you’ll get different numbers. But, the answer is the same. Since Ronald Reagan was elected, Republicans are deficit loving spendaholics compared to Democrats. In other words, Republicans are liberals.
Unemployment rates
There is an old saying, “you get what you pay for.”
This doesn’t apply when you are talking about Republicans. The spending table showed Republicans spend government money like drunken sailors on a port call. Yet, Republican spending, insofar as lowering unemployment, speeding up economic growth, creating jobs and preventing recessions is ineffective.
As far as unemployment, the Reagan presidency’s unemployment decrease stands out in contrast to other Republicans, again. In all other administrations, unemployment falls during Democrats’ presidencies and shoot way up when Republicans are in the White House.
Republicans claim cutting government regulations helps employment. Obviously, like cutting taxes for rich people, the data doesn’t back up their claims.
Doing some more data cherry picking, Trump supporters claim Trump had low unemployment before COVID. The reality is Trump’s mediocre pre-pandemic job gains (covered above in the section on “Job Growth”) merely continued the low unemployment rate trend Obama left Trump with.
Trade deficits
Donald Trump promised he would end our international trade deficit and bring American jobs back home. He also claimed he was the only one who could do it. Trump failed miserably.
Trump wanted a trade war and he got it. He implemented 30 percent tariffs on many imported goods. In turn, other countries put reciprocating tariffs on our exports. Trump also got his way by negotiating new trade agreements with many trading partners including renegotiating NAFTA. These resulted in gut-wrenching, record bankruptcies in agriculture and for companies and industries reliant on exports. It also resulted in higher costs to consumers in all countries.
The results – in Trump’s first year in office, (2017), our trade deficit was -$378 billion. In the following years, the trade deficit increased to -$441 billion to -$448 billion and to -$570 billion in 2020. Like everything else he touched, Trump’s trade war only made things worse . We got bigger trade deficits every year. And, as the tables above show, he certainly didn’t help employment.
The reason Trump failed so spectacularly is that a country’s trade balance has nothing to do with fairness of trade, trade agreements or tariffs. It has everything to do with net national savings.
Economists use this equation to explain trade balances between countries: Private savings – Government savings = Exports – Imports
Government can’t do much about private savings, but can control government savings. If a president wants to lower the trade deficit, lower the government spending deficit. Trying to restrict trade more, as Trump proposes if he gets a second term, will only cost more jobs and create more chaos.
Just to clarify, when trade protections are put on manufacturing jobs or a commodity like steel, it will not affect our trade balance. What these protections do is adversely affect other industries that aren’t protected. Regardless, if it is Trump or Biden, when a liberal government inserts itself into the marketplace and uses trade protections and tariffs to pick winners and losers, bad things happen to the overall economy. Besides unprotected industries, the big losers are consumers that will pay higher prices.
Income inequality
According to a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study, “Income inequality in the U.S. has been rising. Since 1980, real income of the bottom 50 percent of the population has grown about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent have enjoyed 145 percent growth. In addition to ethical concerns over fairness, inequality has practical economic, political, and social consequences. Some research suggests that higher levels of income inequality reduces a country’s aggregate economic growth because it decreases household spending and limits educational opportunities for the children of the less well-off. The unequal distribution of income constrains how much the pie grows for everyone.” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/the-state-of-income-inequality#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20income%20inequality%20in%20the,but%20the%20approach%20has%20limits.
The year 1980 is important. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president. During his term, he lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent to 37 percent. It has stayed in the mid 30 percent range since then. Not coincidentally, income inequality flourished, thanks to Reagan and every Republican president following him..
“It’s vastly oversold that tax cuts will generate job and economic growth,” said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “When you cut taxes for the upper income, you give them more after-tax income, but you don’t do anything for growth.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reached the same conclusion in 2012 . Tax cuts don’t spur growth but do increase income inequality. I will add, tax cuts also increase deficits.
Some claim Trumpian Republicans are populists. Not so. Populists typically are the Robin Hoods of politics. They reappropriate wealth, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Core Republicans are low income, white people without college degrees. Their idea of reappropriating wealth is to make sure rich people get to keep their wealth, often at core Republicans’ expense.
This makes no sense. But, it is the world we live in today.
Stock markets
CNN reported in September 2020 that: “Since 1945, the S&P 500 has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, according to CFRA Research. That’s well ahead of the 6.9% average gain under Republicans.”
Looking at the more recent past, the trend continues.
The data in the table makes Donald Trump look favorable. However, between the 2020 election and when Trump left office, the S&P 500 rallied seven percent in less than a three month period. This indicates markets were happyto see Trump go.
Biden’s economic performance is not fully reflected in the 10 percent annual S&P 500 gain he achieved. Part of this is due to the conventional wisdom, that proved wrong, that the US was headed into a recession. Markets are also reacting to the almost every month threat of the Republican House of Representatives shutting the government down. At the same time, investors had perfectly safe, high interest CD’s competing with the stock market. Despite all this, with Biden as president, the S&P 500 is at all time highs.
Inflation
Average annual inflation rates for 2021, 2022 and 2023 were 4.7 percent, 8.0 percent and 4.1 percent respectively. The current inflation rate is 3.4 percent and continually falling.
A primary driver of recent inflation is rising wages. According to a Center for American Progress (CAP) study, “Real average wage growth for a typical worker during this recovery has been the second highest of all recoveries from post-1980 recessions, and only the COVID-19 recovery (the Biden recovery) has combined robust wage growth with a near-complete recovery of the unemployment rate. The data also suggest that most individual workers are earning more today than they were before the pandemic; every prime-age worker cohort has higher inflation-adjusted median wages than before the pandemic.” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/#:~:text=The%20data%20also%20suggest%20that,wages%20than%20before%20the%20pandemic.
What is going on here?
A lot of things happened over the last 90 years impacting our economy. I’m acknowledging some of them that haven’t been listed previously below. To many people, these are major determinants. In my view, these are short term factors and aren’t the big reasons for the difference in economic performance between Republican and Democratic presidents. We’ll get to those in a bit.
- In 1933, the unemployment rate was 25 percent. Wages fell 43 percent from 1929 to 1933.
- After World War II, millions of veterans were incorporated into an economy shifting from military production to civilian goods.
- John Kennedy cut the highest tax rate for those making over $250,000 annually from 90 to 70 percent. Through his appointees, he revamped the Federal Reserve to be more expansionary.
- Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both benefited from a war economy (Vietnam). However, decisions to fund the war without tax increases may have led to higher inflation. Nixon also sold US grain reserves to Russia. These reserves depressed commodity prices for years.
- Jimmy Carter dealt with a number of issues, some of his making. Society was changing with changing traditions. Consequently, millions of women entered the workforce. There were oil price shocks and inflation increased. Carter appointed a hard nosed Federal Reserve chairman, (Paul Volker) who vowed to tame inflation. Frugal Ron was farming and saw his loan interest rates increase from 7 to 21 percent between 1979 and 1980. (Interest was his biggest expense before the increase.) At the same time, corn prices dropped from $3 to $2/bushel. Not relevant to this article, but these changes inspired a lifelong learning experience in economics for Frugal Ron to understand what caused these things to happen.
- Ronald Reagan became president after beating Carter in 1980. Reagan cut the top tax rate from 70 to 37 percent during his tenure. Cutting tax rates and dramatically increasing government spending was an expansionary fiscal policy while Volker was still using deflationary monetary policy at the Federal Reserve. On Nov. 6, 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This allowed allowed around 3 million immigrants to secure legal status after paying $185, demonstrating “good moral character” and learning to speak English. Between 1980 and 1990, the foreign born population in the US increased from 14.1 million to 19.8 million. This massive influx of immigrants may be the reason Reagan’s presidency was immune to the miserable job growth, low GDP growth and high unemployment that plagued all other Republican presidents after him.
- In the face of rapidly increasing deficits during the recession in the last year of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, he increased tax rates slightly.
- Responding to growing pressure about the deficit, Bill Clinton increased taxes substantially after taking office in 1993. He left office having wiped out the deficit and left government with a surplus.
- George W. Bush decreased tax rates for wealthy people. He created a large deficit and consequently a record high trade deficit.
- Barack Obama cut taxes for middle class families and small businesses and raised them for high earners. He also passed the Affordable Care Act. This provided health insurance to over 20 million uninsured people. Enrollment in 2023 reached over 40 million.
- Donald Trump passed a corporate tax cut with a flat 21 percent tax rate
Why the difference in economic results?
Republican dogma dictates each new Republican president will cut taxes for rich people, dramatically increase government spending for the same people and cut regulations. The data in this article shows these policies do not lead to growing economies or employment gains on the level Democrats continually attain. They do lead to ever increasing record deficits.
Insanity is defined as repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different result. So, are Republicans insane when they keep doing the same things over and over, or is something else happening?
Republicans aren’t having a 40 year mental breakdown. For Republicans, broad based economic growth with high employment and low deficits are not a priority. This is important.
What Republicans are doing is perfectly logical if you understand their goals and values.
Based on current Republican priorities in the House of Representatives and Republican legislation over the last 40 years, here is how one would rate Republican priorities:
- Keep the US white.
- Make life as miserable as possible for Black people by maintaining systemic racism, eliminating education funding and safety net programs.
- Concentrate as much wealth as possible in as few hands as possible.
- Keep growing farmer welfare payments so no US corn, soybean, wheat, rice, cotton, dairy or sugar farmer ever competes in a capitalistic market.
Republicans claim their tax cuts and all the rest are the means to an end result of a strong economy, They are lying. The tax cuts, decreased government regulations, huge spending increases to preferred groups and larger farmer welfare payments are actually the ends they want to achieve.
Republicans simply don’t care if the economy goes into another recession and they run up more deficits. What is important is making rich people richer and protecting preferred farmers. (Most of the food we eat somehow miraculously makes it from the farm to the grocery store with only government food safety involvement.)
Conversely, Democrats do a great job of identifying their goal. It is simple, “use the power of government to improve peoples’ lives.” Looking at the above economic data, they are successfully achieving their goal.
How to grow an economy
Much of this article focused on how not to grow an economy. So, what does work? Following are some text book answers:
- Increase the population. Increasing the population is pretty straightforward. You can either have a birth rate that results in a growing population or you can import people.
- Have abundant mineral, oil, soil and temperate weather resources. Using common sense to maximize these is important. For example, don’t use finite ground water supplies to grow corn that will be burned up as ethanol.
- Improving infrastructure is imperative for increasing a country’s wealth. Moving goods and services quickly and efficiently is essential.
- Investing in human capital is the most important way to increase a nation’s wealth. There are various ways to accomplish this.
- Improving people’s physical and mental health outcomes.
- Developing an educated workforce is essential.
- While improving all of these is important, the biggest bang for the buck is focusing resources at the most “at risk” populations.
A step further…
So how does improving people’s lives increase broad based wealth? Let’s look again at what doesn’t work.
Republicans continually tell us if rich people are given tax cuts, out of their magnanimity, the rich will start their factories and provide jobs for the little people.
This isn’t how it works. New jobs are created when there is increased demand. Tax rates have little or nothing to do with it.
Demand is created when the customer base of people that can afford to buy increases and/or existing customers have more money to spend.
Tying this together, Democrats increase demand for products and services (economic and job growth) by improving the lives of people. If people are better educated, they can earn more money (and pay more taxes). Democrats want to create excellence in education as a key to increasing opportunity for kids of all colors and backgrounds. Republicans look at public education as an area to cut costs and thereby reduce taxes for rich people, who can then afford to send their kids to private schools.
Republicans want to reserve the pool of future high paying jobs for wealthy kids from private schools. A well funded, vibrant, quality public school system expands the number of future well paying jobs and opens that market for kids of all colors and backgrounds. No wonder Republicans fight paying public school teachers for the value they create.
Obviously, Social Security increases the buying power of recipients. Likewise, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act provide health care for people who couldn’t afford it. Healthier people are more productive and can earn more money.
Effective health insurance enables people who have been hospitalized to continue spending on thisngs that grow the economy instead of spending the rest of their lives paying hospital bills. Medicaid also covers costs for the care of elderly. This allows adult children to keep working and generate more economic growth.
Low income women can get subsidized child care that allows them to continue working and generate more income. Food stamps (SNAP) allow low income people to avoid hunger and makes them more valuable to employers.
Democrats do all they can to make birth control and safe and accessible abortion available. By improving lives with these policies, a 15 year old girl doesn’t have to drop out of high school. She can instead go to college, if she chooses, and make a much higher salary. This leads to higher GDP and employment. This is so much different than when I was growing up.
Subsidized school meals and Head Start programs have a proven record of improving student outcomes. They also improve lives. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8000006/
Biden reduced or eliminated school debt for millions of overburdened people. Instead of having to deal with that debt, these former students can buy houses, cars, start families or all kinds of things that generate more jobs and higher economic output. Doing these things that improve people’s lives are like a “thousand points of light” insofar as stimulating economic growth.
From Social Security to student loan forgiveness are Democratic programs. Everyone of them was fought tooth-and-nail by Republicans. Even Social Security isn’t immune from continuing Republican threats. In her presidential campaign, Nicki Haley called for Social Security benefit cuts. Cutting back Social Security has been a crusade of the Koch family, who endorsed Haley.
How including Black people in the economy enhanced incomes
The above graph encapsulates one of my main points. The former Confederate states were stuck in an economic crater ever since the Civil War. White racists did everything they could to deprive Black people of opportunity. Civil rights laws were passed in the early 1950’s and white people were forced, over time to to give Black people something close to equal rights. As the graph shows, everybody was better off. When Democrats use the power of government to improve people’s lives, the economy improves.
Republicans are stuck with their fixed pie vision of the economy where the more people that come to the table, the less pie there is for everyone. This just plain doesn’t work. https://www.frugalron.com/illegal-immigration-the-crisis-that-isnt/
Earlier, the Reagan presidency was identified as an outlier in the dismal list of Republican economic ineptitude. As a point of emphasis worth repeating, it may be the key to Reagan having a more resilient economy that made it through two recessions was his acceptance of millions of migrants. While he was president, three million became full citizens. This presumably had the same effect as including Black people in the South’s economy.
Republicans fight opportunities for people of color with a passion. In Wisconsin, employers are so hard up for college graduates, Republican business groups proposed the University of Wisconsin give lower tuition to Illinois residents if they sign a pledge to stay in Wisconsin for a set number of years after graduating. Yet at the same time, undocumented Wisconsin high school graduates, who already have homes in Wisconsin and don’t have to sign a contract to stay, have to pay out of state tuition to go to a Wisconsin college.
Frugal Ron quit counting how many times he’s heard Wisconsin Republicans saying a variation of, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay some Nigger’s hospital bills!”
Accordingly, the state is one of the few that refuses to pass a Medicaid expansion. The expansion is funded by the federal government. Racist Republicans are proud they prevented working Black people in Milwaukee from getting better health care. Unfortunately, without the Medicaid expansion, rural hospitals in Wisconsin have huge problems collecting from white patients and in some cases are closing. https://madison.com/news/local/health-med-fit/hospital-lawsuits-over-unpaid-bills-on-the-rise-in-wisconsin-study-says/article_d3c4df35-ff56-5e67-b7b7-dc76cd226da8.html
This is not the way to improve people’s lives. It is also not the way to build a strong economy.
Republicans want to limit LGBTIQA+ opportunities, or at least keep them out of sight. These groups contribute to our country in many ways, especially economically. Successful economic growth is color blind, sexual orientation blind and gender blind.
Republicans believe if we make life miserable enough for homeless people, they will get addiction treatment, better jobs and afford an apartment. This doesn’t seem to be working real well.
Every homeless person is an economic opportunity. Houston, Texas reduced homelessness by 61 percent since 2011 by reaching out and proactively helping homeless people get housing and addressing addiction and mental health needs. Many have gotten jobs and are contributing to the economy. Of course, helping these people takes money and commitment to help people improve their lives. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
Last point, as far as improving a nation’s economic performance, don’t ignore infrastructure. Workers are more efficient if they have high speed internet, safe roads, reliable power and all the things that are considered infrastructure. Infrastructure was a Republican priority when Dwight Eisenhower was president, now it is Democrats who walk the walk.
Wrapping-up…
For years on this website, Frugal Ron has correlated Republican out of control spending and huge deficits with their disastrous economic record. However, correlation does not always equal causation. It was time to take another look and see if Frugal Ron’s conservatism is biasing this analysis. It appears there are other explanations besides Republicans’ liberal fiscal policies causing their dismal economic record.
Republican economic policies designed to satisfy the greed of rich people result in recessions and slow growth. In the end, they don’t benefit anyone.
The vision of cold, hard economics is a misnomer. Growing economies are fueled by politicians wanting to help all people improve their lives. This results in more qualified and healthier workers filling better jobs and spending more money and creating more jobs. Basically, this requires a government of moral people doing onto others as we would have them do onto us.
In summary, voters wanting a job creating, growing economy will get better odds gambling in LasVegas than voting for Republicans. Likewise, anyone believing Donald Trump can improve the powerhouse economy Joe Biden created is delusional.
Also, countries like China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada that followed the COVID containment advice Donald Trump spurned had much less devastating death and economic losses than the US. It isn’t a coincidence that these countries are less impacted by inflation than the US.
