Every time that the GOP gets control of the White House, the unemployment rate goes up. How do they deal with that?
Recently, they have been dealing with it by pointing at some other group of workers. "It's not really the fault of our mismanagement of the economy. Those dirty SOBs have taken your jobs.
Details after the jump.
Reagan got into office on the votes of workers with blue collars and white faces. The economy went down the toilet, the treasury borrowed gobs of money (national debt more than doubled over Reagan's eight years), and the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates (with the administrations encouragement). It paid a foreigner much better to buy bonds than to buy machine tools or bulldozers. The domestic market wasn't very hot, either. Consequently, US blue-collar jobs shrank dramatically. (Non-governmental economic factors were also involved.) How to explain this to the guy who had voted for Reagan and was now looking for work? The decision was to tell the white workers that the whole problem was affirmative action; "The Blacks got all your jobs." The fact that Blacks lost a higher percentage of their blue-collar jobs than whites did didn't matter. When did facts matter to Republican politicians?
Today, they have another excuse. It's all those illegal immigrants. It doesn't mater that the number of jobs has grown more slowly than in any previous four-year period. There would be plenty of good jobs for Yanks if the spics hadn't stolen them.
Will they get away with it again?