A Lesson in How Not to Grow the Economy

I’m a bit more skeptical about claims of an American magic in economic growth than the conservative norm, believing that we’ve bought a great deal of our growth by surviving World War II intact and then by borrowing from the future with debt.  But that’s more of a downward adjustment than a contradiction of the power of the American engine.

My agreement with the standard conservative economic view is stronger in the negative:  Bigger government, higher taxes, more regulations, and the entire socialist-progressive project harms the economy and hurts families (which hurts individuals).  These thoughts arise upon reading Peter Ferrara in The Observer (via Instapundit), about the effects of President Obama’s reversal of President Reagan’s pro-growth strategy:

This is why the economy never recovered from the 2008-09 financial crisis, and why instead we got the worst economic recovery from a Recession since the Great Depression, with only 2 percent economic growth. America’s historical record is that the worse the recession is the stronger the recovery, as the economy grows faster than normal for a couple of years to catch up to where it should be on the long-term trendline. That is why we should have come out of the financial crisis in a long-term economic boom, potentially stronger than even Reagan’s.

But to this day, eight years later, that still has not yet happened. Instead, we are still $2 to $3 trillion below where we should be.

This is why Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump promised to restore Reagan’s pro-growth policies. Hillary promised more of the same Obama failure.

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From our perch in Rhode Island, we can surmise that the national Democrats thought they’d achieved what Rhode Island Democrats have: Such complete dominance, with so thoroughly controlled a political system, that they couldn’t lose the electoral game on a scale large enough to cost them power, collectively.  Once a party has achieved that, it gains generations during which it only has to restrain its cronyism, greed, and totalitarian impulses sufficiently not to cause a civic revolution and coast.

But reality has gravity, so the ground will eventually be reached.  If only Rhode Islanders would realize what Americans more generally seem not to have forgotten:  It’s much more difficult to get back off the ground than to allow our fellow passengers to turn the engine back on.

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