Last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican, once again enlisted the Democrats in the House of Representatives to bail out the congressional leader in finding a way to pass a CR resolution and avert an American government shutdown. This was the second time within the calendar year.
American politics has settled into a cycle where the Republican Party promulgates reckless policies that are harmful to the country but beneficial to their contributors. As a result, Democrats are swept into office to clean up the mess. Then when elections come around again the Republicans criticize the Dems janitorial efforts and promote another round of reckless policies that sound good, and…clean, rinse and repeat.
This cycle has been repeated so many times its proving exhausting and tawdry. Two factors seem to be ever ready in place for this cycle to perpetuate. A political party willing and anxious to invoke hyperbole to the point of lying and an electorate with a short attention span.
In 2008 the election of Barack Obama bailed out America from George W. Bush’s Great Recession. In 2020 the election of Joe Biden bailed out Trump’s pratfalls following the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 1940’s FDR had to bail out Herbert Hoover and saved America from the Great Depression. All while the party that got us into this mess slung arrows in hopes of promoting a distortion in order to win the next election.
Usually these policies are in the form of massive tax cuts to the wealthy that don’t deserve a tax cut with no plan to either make up the lost revenue (which involves effort) or just ballooning the budget deficit and increasing the American debt.
This act causes job losses, consumer inflation, and harder access to credit for the Middle Class.
In the case of a pandemic, recession or catastrophic climate change event the only solution is an infusion of liquidity. This keeps the banks open and the consumer’s spending and buttresses the middle class. If not, it would prove to be the total collapse of our economic system, the holy grail of America.
Once again, the Democrats were called on to bail out the GOP while they prance and preen for Donald Trump as the fraudster in chief claims the economy was so good under his administration and points the lie to the Dems accusing them of reckless behavior. If you recall the last year of Trump’s administration, on the heels of the most massive tax cut for the rich which sent our country into record income inequality, worse than even the Gilded Age; we were blindsided by a massive worldwide pandemic. What was Trump’s response under his watch? Record unemployment, massive deaths while Nero dithered about testing, vaccines and sensible health policies. We had the 13th highest death rate of any country in the world and #1 among the prosperous countries overall. The economy was sent into a tailspin.
The only solution, once again, was for Joe Biden to come in and inject the economy with cash. Full employment was bolstered, but Inflation followed, tamed by higher interest rates by the Federal Reserve.
Now inflation has been tamed, interest rates are coming down, employment is being watched and the Republicans showboated in congress threatening yet another Government shutdown.
Democrats! Cleanup in aisle 7.