Bush may not be welcome on the campaign trail, but his failed economic polices remain cornerstone ideas in the party's platform.
"
Republicans Have a Data Problem" is about the most charitable way possible to describe what should by all rights be the biggest problem faced by modern conservatism: For decades, both their implemented economic policies and their economic predictions have
repeatedly and continually failed.
Among many other Republicans, the current presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John R. Kasich and Jeb Bush all denounced the “job-killing” consequences of Mr. Obama’s policies.
Yet the economy gained 2.9 million jobs in 2014, more than in any year since 1999, during Mr. Clinton’s term. Net job creation during the 15 years that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama occupied the White House has topped 30 million. That is 50 percent more than were created in the 20 years of Mr. Reagan and both Mr. Bushes. [...]
Today, the United States has the strongest major economy in the world.
These things have been consistent. Republicans have time and time again asserted that each round of "tax cuts" would result in growth; that growth did not appear. Republicans have over and over vowed that this or that non-conservative economic policy would have specific, devastating effects; it doesn't happen. This is a phenomenon that many and technical experts refer to as
being full of shit, and something that can be quite damaging to your career if your career consists of any endeavor other than:
1. Appearing on Fox News.
2. Getting yourself elected to something.
And yet if anything, the conservative phenomenon of predicting social or economic disaster if their ideological opponents do a given something has gotten even more bluster-filled, and even less noted by the press, over the last ten years. It takes a great, heaping quantity of being full of shit to propose, as has actually happened, that the Bush economic meltdown was not caused by deregulation policies that encouraged financial institutions to engage in both destabilizing gambling efforts and destabilizing crookedness but instead was the preemptive shudder of financial markets worried that Barack Obama might later become president. It takes similar quantities of brain manure to go from predicting a small, cheap war in Iraq with few casualties and glowing regional results to asserting, ten long years later, that it all would have worked out fine if opponents of those policies had not unduly pressed for the provably not small, provably not cheap, provably casualty riddled effort to, a decade later, be scaled back. The conservative id continues to assert that Republicans "kept us safe" even while peppering their arguments with images of Americans under the last conservative president demonstrably being not safe; Dick Cheney will continue to assert his wisdom as foreign policy expert and predictor of doom at every non-conservative turn twenty years after he is dead. There's no end to it.
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But economic policy is measurably different from most of the others. It can, in fact, be measured. There's decades of data, and fifty states worth of separate economic decisions that can be readily compared against one another, and when various elements of conservative economic policy are undertaken in a state like, say, Gov. Sam Brownback's Kansas, the effects of those policies can be directly observed in resulting budget numbers, in resulting measurements of poverty, of education, and of resident health, and all of this can be rolled up into conclusive evidence of what has worked and what has not. We can then use this information to abandon the ideas that have been concretely identified as being completely full of shit, thus paving the way for, perhaps, new, better ideas.
Or, alternatively, people who have proven to be completely goddamn wrong for twenty years and counting could get themselves booked on America's worst news programs to promise that this next time, by God, it will of course naturally work out differently because they have studied these things for twenty years and they are top-notch experts on these things.
I'm not sure when conservatism started turning the prosaic notion of keeping track of facts and figures and referring back to them into a liberal conspiracy to be shunned, but my own fuzzy memory marks the phenomenon as rising step-by-step with the ascension, specifically, of Fox News and new "pundits" such as Bill O'Reilly. It was the Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Fox & Friends version of punditry that required having partisan opinions on things quickly, and it was the Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity version of punditry that moved beyond the Crossfire approach of opposing pundits shouting opposing points at each other to simply cutting the other fellow's microphone off and calling it done.
And no, for the record, I am not saying that either Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly are singlehandedly responsible for turning their party stupid—surely, that power is beyond even them. I'm just noting that the Fox News network approach of stating an "authoritative-ish" conservative idea and specifically demonizing, by name, any expert or politician who asserts the opposite is now in fact how the conservative Republican party approaches all arguments. There are a small set of approved "conservative" ideas. Those who stray from those ideas are wrong, because they are wrong. And that's all that needs to be talked about, because if a given war, tax cut, labor policy, health policy, or the entirety of Gov. Sam Brownback's Kansas isn't actually performing as promised the new solution is now that you're simply not allowed to bring any of those things up.