If you follow the Rightwing Noise Machine (and who doesn’t like being dragged down a dark tarry tunnel into Sheol?), then you know that conservatives are shrewd, hardheaded impresarios of enterprise and growth — unlike, say, welfare queens or John Maynard Keynes).
More than anything, that’s the purported chewy nugget center of the current gaff-haunted GOP nominating campaign, with Mitt Romney being the latest beamish boy to inherit decamillionaire status from his Dad, only to urge the virtue of thrift as macroeconomic policy. Well, that, and a preternatural fear of gay people.
But like Donald Trump’s hairdo, you just have to blow on this Tea Party meme to see the ugly roots. Leaving aside the fact that most conservatives don’t know a debit from a credit, and are so economically illiterate that they think tax deductions are bad things (I want more deductions, not fewer), the fact is that no Republican President since WWII left office with unemployment under 5 %. Not one.
Three Democrats have: Truman, Johnson, and Clinton. But not one Republican. Not a single one.
Every single Democratic President left office with a lower unemployment rate than when he entered office. Every single one. Even the much maligned bête noireof the Rightwing Noise Machine, Jimmy Carter. That’s right, Carter reduced the catastrophic rate he inherited from the Nixon/Ford Maladministration.
Every Republican President (except one) left office with a higher unemployment rate. And that exception put Keynes to shame by running the biggest deficit in US history. That’s right, it was Reagan.
Anybody outside Tea Party Occupied America might see a pattern forming. When it comes to economic policy, hearing conservatives tout their prowess is like enduring a PBS Special on how the Bee Gees are musically underrated. And speaking of a documentary that Gotta Get A Message To You, here’s a clip from Megadittoes – The Cult of the Tea Party, which addresses this very same conservative meme.
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