By Josh Moon
Alabama Political Reporter
Republicans are the greatest con men on Earth.
I am almost in awe of their skills and abilities to dupe the Republican voters into voting for them. At all. Much less to the point that they control Congress and the White House.
Because every hard statistic says they’re awful at governing.
Seriously, there’s not a single metric available that indicates the GOP’s ideas for governance are successful, particularly in the long term. They are horrible at foreign relations, downright atrocious at infrastructure, loudly wrong about policing and crime prevention and just God awful at unifying.
But what they are the absolute worst at – and I’m talking Trump sentence-level bad here – is the economy.
Don’t believe me? Go to the scoreboard.
Democrats, since the Great Depression, have created 24 million more jobs, saw a 44-percent higher GDP increase and experienced an 18-percent lower unemployment rate.
Business investment has been 200 percent higher under Democrats. And Republicans have been in charge during nine of the last 10 recessions.
Try this sometime: Pull up Google, type in “US deficits by president,” and look at the charts. They’re all the same: Up during the red years, down during the blue years.
At a point, it’s time to say that the Republican economic approach – the idea that if you cut rich people’s taxes, the benefits will “trickle down” to the rest of America – not only doesn’t work, it’s stupid.
Every time America cuts the tax rates for the wealthy, the same exact thing happens.
The deficit swells, the debt rises, the economy goes in the tank.
That is followed by the same thing: A Democrat is elected president, the tax cuts are rolled back, the economy straightens out.
When we lift the country from the bottom, it always does better. Always.
It works the same at the state level, where the worst state economies are in low-tax, high-regressive tax, red states. States, like Alabama, that are perpetually broke and looking for handouts.
According to a WalletHub ranking of best state economies, seven of the top 10 are run by Democratic governors. And of the three that aren’t, two of those states’ legislatures are controlled by Democrats.
Nine of the bottom 10 in that survey are all controlled by Republican governors. Democrats don’t control any part of those 10 state legislatures.
This is the reality. The cold, hard facts.
And I point them out now because there is an abomination of a tax cut proposal floating about Congress right now. Because it was crafted by Republicans, you can be sure that it follows the same outline.
The wealthy get huge tax breaks, starting with corporations.
It was introduced earlier this week by the White House spokesperson, who gave a general outline in the form of a shared Facebook post from your drunk uncle – the one with the blurry profile pic whose entire Facebook timeline is shares of political and borderline racist memes.
On the day we learned that three of the president’s campaign advisors, including his campaign manager, were arrested, with one pleading guilty already, Sarah Sanders took an excruciatingly long time to lay out this absurd tax analogy about reporters drinking in a bar – before she finally got around to proclaiming that those men who worked on the campaign that got the president elected had nothing to do with the president.
Republicans love to do this sort of thing – boil complicated issues down to hokey taglines and analogies. In this one, the reporters are paying their bar tab in the same manner our tax system is set up, with the wealthiest paying a higher percentage. And the premise is that the guys who put in more get more of a break when the bartender gives them a discount.
Of course, this little analogy left out that the wealthy guys were getting most of their beer from an off-shore island and were buying the poor reporters’ beers because their greed and deregulation a few years earlier had caused those guys to lose their jobs and their houses.
And to make Sanders’ analogy a bit more realistic, the $100 tab should have been for beers that cost a million dollars, and the bar should be $20 trillion in debt.
Reality very rarely can be boiled down to a cute analogy, and complex governance issues can rarely be explained in a sentence-long soundbite. But there are rare exceptions.
Republicans stink at governing.
