Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Republicans Think America Is Doing Terribly, but It Isn’t
Journalist, columnist, and blogger Ezra Klein. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Must-Read: America looks bright today primarily from the perspective of the rich, the techie, and those who have benefitted from ObamaCare’s coverage expansion. That is not most Republicans. The lived experience of most non-poor–and many poor–Republicans in the Bush 43 and Obama years is not of participating in the second tech bubble, or even benefitting greatly from ObamaCare because their local political rulers and masters have not implemented it. And they couldn’t care less that Greece and Italy and France and Britain are doing even worse:
: Republicans Think America Is Doing Terribly, but It Isn’t: “Anyone watching the fourth Republican debate would be excused…
…for thinking America is mired in a deep recession–that the economy is shrinking, foreign competitors are outpacing us, more Americans are uninsured, and innovators can’t bring their ideas to market…. They would be surprised to find that unemployment is at 5 percent, America’s recovery from the financial crisis has outpaced that of other developed nations, the percentage of uninsured Americans has been plummeting even as Obamacare has cost less than expected, and there’s so much money flowing into new ideas and firms in the tech industry that observers are worried about a second tech bubble.
This beats even the markers the Republican Party established. In 2011, for instance, Mitt Romney made headlines when he promised that ‘after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent–perhaps a little lower.’ We’re now quite a bit lower than 6 percent, and in less than four years…. The economy simply isn’t as bad as they’re making it out to be….
[And] Republicans are increasingly focused on economic problems they don’t really know how to solve, and don’t have much credibility to say they will solve…. Republican tax plans will sharply increase after-tax inequality, and they will do so in the most obvious and mechanical of fashions…. Republicans have entered into a disastrous arms race of ever more expensive tax plans that they have no way to pay for…. Republicans are stuck between a description of the economy that seems increasingly detached from the reality of the recovery and a set of economic plans that actually worsen many of the problems Republicans say they want to solve. It’s a pickle.