I'd rather have the economy trending to 5.4% than the one trending to 2.2%.
Trump Republicanism overpromised and has not delivered. It has been nothing more than an irritable mental gesture toward Reaganism.
Reagan Republicanism, as a form of liberalism, underestimated the power of evil in human nature. It sincerely but naively thought that everything would turn out just hunky dory if you let people decide what to do with their own money, and give them more of it.
Well, they miss-allocated it, just in a more respectable form than the corner beggar.
The post-war consensus had kept ordinary income tax rates high and arbitraged that against relatively lower long term capital gains tax rates which benefited the domestic investment which produced the jobs, marriages, durable goods purchases, and homes young people can only dream about today. In short, the GDP.
The high ordinary income tax rates went bye-bye, and the money went where it was willed in an orgy of individualism. The big money got miss-allocated in the dot-com bubble, and globalism arrived just in the nick of time to rescue it, fleeing abroad. As a result middle classes were built elsewhere while the middle class at home withered. It now had to work two jobs and have smaller, or no, families. And cultural commentators seriously wonder how identity came to be questioned to the point of gender.
We can quantify this social disaster in the form of $10.5 trillion of missing real GDP in 3Q2026 since 3Q1983.
We have today $24.611 trillion of real GDP, having grown at a compound annual rate of 2.733% for the 43 years since 1983.
At the 36-year post-war CAGR of 3.585%, however, real GDP would be $35.104 trillion instead, 42.6% better.
Nothing guarantees that growth would have continued at the old post-war rate had the Reagan Revolution never occurred, but that doesn't change the fact that he sold his program in the belief that America's best days were not behind her.
Arguing at this long remove that Reaganism hasn't really been tried reminds me of nothing so much as Keynesianism redivivus. And AOC thinks his first name is Milton.
Republicans today are oblivious to all of this, and the only Democrat who comes close to understanding it that I know of is Rahm Emanuel, but the Democrat Party of today openly hates the Joos.
We are, as the kids like to say, totally screwed.
