It was not for nothing that Sen. Pete Sessions advises his party to emulate the taliban. Both Republicans and Islamic militants are in a roughly similar position: A fanatical fringe committed to irrational Dark Age doctrines with no purpose and horrific human consequences, discredited by modern society and left with no recourse but to impose their will by naked power and insurgent sabotage.
Ask a Republican how to deal with a recession, and you would be safe in betting your life against a steak dinner they will not ask for specifics before laying out their prescription: Cut upper-income and corporate taxes and reduce public spending. They will not ask or state what current rates are, what they are relative to other rates, nor what they should be, because that information - the facts of the situation - has no bearing on their thinking. What counts is the act of cutting, which they regard as an expression of a moral principle.
Ask them how to deal with sluggish growth, or even how to encourage an already-booming economy, and their response will be no different: Cut upper-income and corporate taxes, and cut public spending. Iterate the question through as many different permutations as you please, the result will be the same - their "solution" is fixed in stone. To a rational person it becomes rapidly apparent that the GOP isn't playing with a full deck, but the problem goes much deeper than Republicans being Beavis-like creatures with a single response to everything: They do not even agree with the literal definitions of the nouns in the question, like "economy," nor do they even agree with the unstated assumption that the purpose of economics is to increase general prosperity.
This fact is easily illustrated by asking a simple question: What should be done if these tax rates and social spending are already zero? While some will equivocate, eventually you will get their honest response to that set of circumstances: Under those conditions, there is no problem to be solved.
Got that? If the taxes of the wealthy and corporations are zero, and no public money is spent (or "redistributed") on social programs, then there cannot be an economic problem by definition. Or, at least, they will claim that any problems which do exist are to be blamed on their victims, and thus by default there is nothing wrong with "the economy." If ten million people were homeless and starving, and the National Guard was in the streets to quell food riots, but the tax and spending situation were as they suggest, they would regard the situation as ideal and recognize no problem. This leads one then to question exactly what these maniacs think an "economy" is, and what they regard its purpose to be.
From countless conversations with Republicans, I believe I can say this with all confidence: They do not regard markets as tools to benefit society, but as magical beings or divinities whom mere humans live to serve, and whom governments exist solely to protect from "interference" by democracy, social activism, or unionization. It is these entities they regard to hold not only national sovereignty, but to define moral virtue.
Try to realize what these means: They do not even agree that it is desirable to increase the political power and economic prosperity of average human beings, because this involves compromising the unfettered operation of free market divinities whose "judgment" is to be regarded as the standard by which all actions are weighed. It is the "will of God" that millions of people be in desperate poverty and a select few live lives without challenge or accountability, so enacting policy which changes this state of affairs is a grave blasphemy that must be met with the most concerted rhetorical (or literal) violence.
For more than a thousand years, the European nobility were convinced of their divine right to privilege and comfort, and were mutually supported in their claims by Church doctrines affirming that the distinction between lords and serfs was sanctioned by God. That is why early attempts to bring democracy and social justice to the medieval world (yes, there were a few) were abortive, and always ended in the murder of the precocious freedom fighters. Similar dynamics are taking shape now, with a corporate nobility being supported in its claims to impunity by a conservative priesthood - the Free Market Mullahs - and its media in concerted, manic, desperate fury to crush mankind's greatest experiment and sink humanity back into the long night.