So I hear it again. The economy is SOOOO bad. Biden is doing such a bad job, he's ruining us. And then when you ask them what Biden did to ruin the economy, they can't name anything, or they go "everything" or they claim him spending as he did caused inflation in the best case scenario. But generally, we get nothing.
The fact is, these guys just complain when the economy is controlled by democrats, and cheer when it's controlled by republicans. Never mind that consequentially, the differences between the two and the general health of the economy arent much different. In traditional terms, like unemployment rates, GDP growth, inflation, etc., the economy tends to grow and work well under republican and democratic policies alike, and not much really changes on a macro level between them. The real differences come from policies that come when downturns happen. Republicans generally are bigger on trickle down, wanting to impose austerity on people, which is harmful by the way, in order to give more money to so called "job creators" and create more jobs. Whereas democrats want to spend more money, even deficit spending, in order to stabilize peoples' lives and encourage growth. It's quite clear my own approach toward economics is more aligned with the democrats and keynesianism, rather than the republicans. Republican policies harm people and generally only help those at the top, whereas democratic policies tend to help people all over the spectrum. Both represent different ways to recover economies, and democrats generally have a more evidence based policy than republicans, who operate off of trickle down theory, which has long been debunked.
Yet whenever democrats are in charge, republicans love to act like the economy was so bad, and when a republican gets on they about face and suddenly it's great. Like when Obama oversaw the great recession recovery, republicans complained democratic policies were holding people back and that if republicans were in charge we'd have SO MANY JOBS. They kept this narrative up through 2016, and then suddenly in January 2017, all hail trump, the guy who created so many jobs we don't know what to do with them. Did anything really change? No.
Same thing with COVID, when the republicans were in charge they blamed democrats locking everything down on, but then when democrats took over, they started blaming them for inflation when everything opened up. You can't win with these guys. They'll just attack the democrats on everything.
And yes, I know I complain about the economy too. But keep in mind what my view is. My idea is that the economy AS IT EXISTS is screwed. The policies that affect the macro scale dont matter much, and the discussion over which side creates more jobs is misplaced. Because jobs arent the answer. Jobs and a belief system that has built up a cult like devotion for them are the problem. We need MORE economic intervention to make the economy truly just for most americans and to give people real prosperity and real choice within our economy. As it is, the difference between republicans and democrats really is window dressing. And yes, democrats are better than republicans in line with my ideology, but that's because i believe in interventionism to improve markets beyond what so called laissez faire "free markets" can do.
This is why I backed Sanders in 2016. The recession and learning about larger macro economic trends have caused me to lose faith in the traditional idea of the american economy, and I believe we need to do better. We can't afford to just screw around the edges, we need massive changes like we have not seen since the days of FDR. Ideas like UBI, universal healthcare, free college, a housing program, etc. As I said, sanders was never perfect, but he at least offered a reasonable amount of change and was thinking about these things. my ideas align more with Yang and his human centered capitalism.
But yeah. When I hear conservatives go on about the economy being bad, I have to wonder what they want. Most of the stuff they're arguing about doesnt change the macro situation either way. Republicans, democrats, it doesn't matter. Larger macroeconomic trends are just a boom bust cycle. And if anything, in recent decades, the busts tend to happen under republicans, and booms happen under the democrats. Not saying that this is because democrats are better on the economy. A lot of it is just luck, and these cycles happening to align roughly with presidential election cycles (i mean, imagine the average cycle lasting 8 years...with your average president serving 8 years, then account for some variation in the cycles, for example, there were 9 years between the 1992 and 2001 busts, and 7 between the 2001 and 2008 ones).
Again, when you vote based on economics, it's best to think in terms of who benefits from the exact policies being implemented. The right tends to support policies that primarily help the rich, and the left tends to support policies aimed at the rest of the income distribution, although they quite frankly don't do enough to actually fix the problems, simply slightly alleviate them relative to the republican position. We actually need to do far more than we do if we want to actually see an economy work for everyone.
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