Every time the Republicans are in power, they run the country into the ground, and every single time, the Democrats have to clean it up. It’s like a bunch of little kids trash the house, and the parents have to clean up after them.
At what point do you just kick the kids out of the house? Why can’t we just have consecutive Democrat presidents?
Let’s look at the track record of Republican presidents:
[ul]
[li]Hoover, a Republican, caused the Great Depression[/li][li]Reagan and Bush Sr, Republicans, caused a war and a recession[/li][li]Bush Jr, a Republican, caused a war and a recession[/li][li]It looks like Trump, a Republican, will cause a recession, if not an outright depression[/li][/ul]
At what point do people realize that Republicans are bad at governing?
This is a consequence of the 4-year/8-year cycle. It means that if a Republican screws up, a Democrat is in office long enough to fix things, but then by the time it is fixed, the public fatigues of the Democrat (because people generally get tired of one party after eight years of red or blue) and votes in a Republican for change. There is also the perverse consequence that by the time the Democrats’ time in office is over, the economy is good enough that the Republican can hum along well on it for a while (Bush inherited Clinton’s economy, Trump inherited Obama’s economy.)
That being said, I would like to nitpick a bit about Trump causing a depression: The current Covid crisis is so severe globally that no nation can escape its effects. Even if Trump had turned in a magnificent Grade-A performance on the pandemic from day one (and he hasn’t, he’s been more like D+), the U.S. is so interconnected to global trade that we’d still see a recession. It wouldn’t be as bad as it is now, but it would still be a downturn. Even President Hillary couldn’t stave off a Covid recession.
In fact if Trump had done the right thing and prolonged stay at home orders the economy would suffer the more for it. He still should have, but the recession was inevitable.
We’d see a recession, no doubt, but let’s not forget that as the world’s largest and most influential economy, there’s a certain level of responsibility to get the public health response right. This is what pundits talk about when they say that “America has to lead.” It’s not that the world sits on its ass and waits for Captain America to save it. It’s simply the understanding that it has a responsibility not to start a global financial crisis, and a global responsibility to do what it can to arrest a pandemic while leaving as much of its economy intact as it can. The fact that Korea and Singapore and Germany have done that is great but now they’re going to suffer because we fucked it up. Not the first time, mind you.
But Trump is handling the economic crisis just as poorly as he’s handling the medical crisis. Other countries are experiencing much lower rates of unemployment just like they’re experiencing much lower rates of disease.
A whole lot of people already know this. I would say that even a lot of Republicans probably know this too. But the right has been very effective at selling the message that demonizes Democrats that so many Republicans would never in a million years dream of voter for “them”. Layer on the gerrymandering and voter suppression, which the do because they know they don’t have the raw vote numbers, and they remain in power.
To further nitpick on the cause of recessions, to some extent, recessions are just built in to the business cycle and are going to occur no matter who is in power, so you can’t entirely lay any particular recession solely at the feet of any particular administration. What Republican mismanagement tends to do, though, is 1) if a recession is on the way, it gets accelerated and more likely to happen under Republican control and 2) the recessions that do happen end up being worse for a variety of reasons, such as further mismanagement or already running such a huge deficit (such as large tax cuts for the rich) that things like stimulus spending become a harder to execute response. Perversely, Republicans have created the appearance of being the party that is a good steward of the economy. They get credit for enhancing booms, but somehow avoid blame for also enhancing the busts.
In a sane world, both parties would work to minimize the down swings of the business cycle and recessions would be more or less random relative to which party is in power, but, well, you know.
Well, yes and no. It’s not that either country is immune to the downswings of the business cycle, it’s just that their downswings are brief and/or small enough to allow for quick recovery and so do not to fit the definition of a recession. The linked article acknowledges that the Australian economy had contracted in a previous quarter before bouncing back. But I do agree with your larger point that they are both examples of much smarter ways to manage national economies.
Hoover did not cause the Great Depression. That is not correct.
Which Wars did Reagan & Bush Sr. cause?
Bush Jr. Guilty as charged. 2 Wars at once in fact.
Trump, forget about it.
If you are going to accuse Reagan and Bush Sr. of causing a recession, then it’s only fair to credit Reagan with the 1980s economic boom. And Bush Sr. didn’t cause the 1991 Gulf War, a guy named Saddam did (by the way, the Gulf War was a spectacular victory for the USA.)
And if we are going to go down this route, Democratic presidents are largely responsible for the Vietnam War.
Oh, OK, well then just learn to like Republicans, 'cause that’s what you’re going to get until we figure out a new way to do it. As Lewis Black famously put it, “Apparently the devil you know is better than winning.”
