I remember sitting on a dock at a fishing camp in Southern Louisiana just after Barack Obama won in 2008 chatting politics with some members of my extended family. None of us had voted for Obama and we all had hopes that the GOP would regroup and take the House in 2010 and maybe the White House two years after that.
My argument was that Obama was a classic neo-Socialist Liberal who had absolutely no idea how to rescue a vibrant free market economy in the throes of a once in a generation slump like the one we were in after the 2008 crash. I argued that, like every other Democratic Politician of his ilk, Obama had only a hammer in his tool chest and every problem he was likely to see would appear to him as a nail. He would, as such men often do, go to the same old well of higher taxes, restrictive regulations and unreasonable spending. And those things, I predicted, would make it impossible for Obama to “fix” our broken economy.
Not that I was excited about a ruined economy staying ruined, but I knew that the solutions to the mess we were in resided on the Right and not the Left and so I calculated that increased short term pain would more quickly bring back the leaders who understood how to fix things… or more accurately, leaders who understood that to fix the economy, all they had to do was get out of the way.
I was both right and wrong. The GOP did take back The House and, eventually, The Senate. But despite his record of utter failure both at home and abroad, Obama remained personally popular and clung to power for eight years, frustrating GOP attempts to reverse the Liberal “cures” that were killing the economic patient. (And by the way, things did not improve until the day, literally THE day, that a business-savvy, deal-making disruptor arrived in Washington).
Anyway, two years later, on the eve of what would turn out to be an historic GOP wave in the 2010 midterms, I remember thinking that I’d been right on that dock on the bayou. But even I was surprised at how awful Obama had turned out to be as an economic steward.
Well we are only 100 days into the Biden era and I’m already having the same feelings about Ole Joe. Biden is a classic tax-and-spend Liberal… for 50 years he has had no other tool in his bag. I knew he was going to screw this up.
And yet…
I woke up this morning to see that the jobs number is not just bad, but awful. 266K jobs created with an expectation that the number was going to be more like 1 Million. Even worse, Biden managed to take a surging economy finally emerging from a year of lockdowns and RAISE the Unemployment Rate from 6% to 6.6% (5.8% was the prediction).
That’s not just bad, that’s Oscar ratings bad.
So, why do I keep getting surprised by the Left’s repeated awful economic results?
I think a big part of it is Confirmation Bias. Intellectually, I know that there are morons in Government like AOC and Bernie! who believe in cockamamie economic concepts like Modern Monetary Theory, but that knowledge keeps getting overwhelmed by my Confirmation Bias.
I think the problem is that it’s SO obvious to me how raising taxes and increasing regulations on business and paying people not to work and abolishing rent and pumping trillions of dollars into an economy can (and will) destroy an economic recovery, or keep a struggling economy down, that I can’t wrap my brain around the idea that the Left is just going to keep on doing those things anyway. I understand those mechanisms so well that it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that there are people who don’t. My brain sticks its fingers in its ears, closes its eyes and shouts, LALALALALA HOW CAN THEY NOT SEE IT!?!?
And yet every 4 or 8 years we get an Obama or a Biden and I have to relearn that which I really should know at this point. They really don’t have any idea what they’re doing. But they’re gonna just keep on doing it anyway.
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