What the Republicans Have Wrought

It is amazing how effective the right wing politicians in the US have been in wrecking their own economy. They are doing this to plump up their chances of election because they reason that making things bad will cause the public to turn on the party that talk about sharing wealth and building up the economy. With enough despair they expect the public to turn to the party that talks about keeping your wealth and giving more to those very rich "job creators" in the hopes that you can bribe them into creating more jobs.

Here are some bits from an article by Robert Shiller in The Project Syndicate:

It might not seem that Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and growing concern about the United States’ debt position should shake basic economic confidence. But they apparently have. And loss of confidence, by discouraging consumption and investment, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing the economic weakness that is feared. Significant drops in consumer-confidence indices in Europe and North America already reflect this perverse dynamic.

We now have a daily index for the US, the Gallup Economic Confidence Index, so we can pinpoint changes in confidence over time. The Gallup Index dropped sharply between the first week of July and the first week of August – the period when US political leaders worried everyone that they would be unable to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling and prevent the US from defaulting on August 2. The story played out in the news media every day. August 2 came and went, with no default, but, three days later, a Friday, Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating on long-term US debt from AAA to AA+. The following Monday, the S&P 500 dropped almost 7%.

Apparently, the specter of government deadlock causing a humiliating default suddenly made the US resemble the European countries that really are teetering on the brink. Europe’s story became America’s story.

Changes in public confidence are built upon such narratives, because the human mind is very receptive to them, particularly human-interest stories. The story of a possible US default is resonant in precisely this way, implicating as it does America’s sense of pride, fragile world dominance, and political upheavals.

...

The timing and substance of these consumer-survey results suggest that our fundamental outlook about the economy, at the level of the average person, is closely bound up with stories of excessive borrowing, loss of governmental and personal responsibility, and a sense that matters are beyond control. That kind of loss of confidence may well last for years.

That said, the economic outlook can never be fully analyzed with conventional statistical models, for it may hinge on something that such models do not include: our finding some way to replace one narrative – currently a tale of out-of-control debt – with a more inspiring story.

Not since the Germans elected the Nazi party because of their promise to revive the economy and remove the stain of losing WWI has a political party so cynically lied to an electorate to gain power. The Nazis willing wrecked the German state in their mad bid to become rulers of the world. The Republicans are willing to wreck their own economy in order to toss out the Democrats and "rule" over America. I would have thought the disaster of Hoover in the early 1930s or the more recent disaster of George Bush in the early 2000s would have disqualified the Republicans from ruling anything more than a cesspit.