Which is why our guy is still allowed out in public.
While we were all raising our eyebrows at Marco Rubio's campaign-speech description of the 1990s as a sort of prehistoric before-times, a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we paid our taxes with sticks and pebbles, we missed out on mocking Rubio
for far more concrete reasons.
“Too many leaders” are “busy looking backwards,” the Florida Republican said.
“So they do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to … compete in a global economy. And so our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing and borrowing and regulating like it was 1999.”
The problem with the senator’s statement is that the government is neither taxing, nor borrowing, nor regulating like it did in 1999. In fact, in 1999 there was a surplus, shrinking the debt owned by the public.
Yes, I do remember that. Candidate George W. Bush was very miffed by the surplus, and campaigned on the notion of lowering taxes for rich people so such a monstrous thing would never happen again.
As for regulating, 1999 was notable in part for repealing key sections of the Glass-Steagall Act.
He's got us there. We began the new millennium kissing Wall Street's collective posterior, and fifteen years later all government policy continues to revolve around doing the same thing. What could go wrong? Again, I mean?
Head below the fold to find out.
While most pundits have interpreted his speech as an extended dig at both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, it highlights the central problem facing any Republican candidate. The 1990s were, in relative terms, a prosperous time. The moment the next Republican president took over it went to hell. After that president left, one Great Recession and two wars and multiple oopsies later, a Democratic president took office and everything (very slowly) got better again.
This continues to be Jeb Bush's biggest problem, but will certainly dog the neoconservative "New American Century" Rubio as well. We tried their ideas. Their ideas were not just bad, they were terrible. Catastrophic, even. Their ideas led to what many erudite people now believe was the worst presidency in modern history, and the Rubio (or, sigh, Jeb) version of those ideas, on tax policy, on deregulation, and on foreign policy, is indistinguishable from the version that sent everything to hell in a handbasket in most voter's recent memory. Marco Rubio is going to need more than a rom-com styled logo with elaborately dotted i's to sell that mad cow.
Again, does no pundit see this as at all odd or unusual? We're again right back to the point where wealthy people are considered too burdened, where big business is considered to put-upon, and where neoconservative hawks are itching for a war in the Middle East. Every last thing that ended in catastrophe when they were advocated for by these same names, working with the same think tanks, funded by the same funders is being offered up again as if none of it had ever happened, or as if we just didn't try hard enough last time around. We don't consider this sociopathic, then? Or is none of it supposed to make sense, and are we the suckers for presuming it ought to?