Republican Doomsday Predictions Are Always Wrong
Whenever a new Democratic president takes office, the Republicans have a history of making predictions of doom. History has demonstrated that those predictions haven’t aged well. The economy has always done better under Democratic presidents.
In 2015, President Obama noticed this trend of GOP pessimism and responded in a humorous way in a speech at the Democratic National Committee:
“Why is it that so many Republican politicians are so down on America?”
“They’ve constructed this entire separate reality. It’s like the Twilight Zone,” Obama said.
“Have you noticed that?” Obama asked the crowd of about 500 cheering women. “I mean, they are gloomy. They’re like Grumpy Cat.”
Then he turned the corners of his mouth down into a frown, emulating the famous feline.
“Everything is terrible, according to them,” he said. “We’re doomed!”
President Obama was right. Now, let’s take a little trip down memory lane and compare the Republican predictions of doom with reality. As I’ve said here before, history matters. Republican propaganda depends upon amnesia and bad memories. Our job is to refresh those memories since most voters aren’t political junkies.
REPUBLICAN PREDICTIONS OF DOOM IN 1993.
To clean up the deficit mess he inherited from Reagan and Bush, President Bill Clinton proposed to raise taxes on the wealthy and cut spending. Not one Republican voted for the 1993 Clinton budget. Instead, every Republican predicted that Clinton’s economic program would cause a recession and increase the deficit. For example, John Kasich (then a Republican congressman from Ohio) contended that: “I feel bad for the people who really are the working people in this country, people in my family, who are going to get the penalties from people who don’t want to invest more, take any more risks. They’re going to lose their jobs, and that’s the tragedy of this program. We’re going to come back here next year, there will be higher deficits, there will be more spending, we’ll continue to have a very slow economy, people aren’t going to go to work.”
Newt Gingrich on the Clinton tax increase on the rich: “I believe that will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession. It might take 1 1/2 or 2 years, but it will happen.”
Just how did those Republican predictions of doom and gloom play out? As we know, they were dead wrong. What followed the passage of the 1993 Clinton budget package was the greatest peacetime economic boom in U.S. history. During the Clinton Presidency, 22 million new jobs were created, unemployment declined from 7% to 4%, median family income rose, and poverty declined to its lowest rate in 20 years. The Clinton budget also converted what was then the largest budget deficit in American history to a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next ten years.
REPUBLICAN PREDICTIONS OF DOOM DURING THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY.
John Boehner on Obama Care: Passage of health reform is “Armageddon” because the law will “ruin our country.”
Ben Sasse on Obama Care: “If the Affordable Care Act survives, America will cease to exist.”
Donald Trump on November 7, 2012: “The stock market and US dollar are both plunging today. Welcome to Barack Obama’s second term.”
In 2009, Republicans made the following predictions:
Representative Dan Burton of Indiana : “We are heading toward hyperinflation again.”
Senator John McCain of Arizona: “My great worry is that…we will find ourselves back in the situation we were in the 1970s, when we had hyperinflation and had to debase the currency.”
Representative Paul Broun of Georgia: “I think we’re fixing to head for hyperinflation.”
Once again, Republican predictions of doomsday turned out to be wildly off the mark. During the Obama presidency, the unemployment rate was reduced from 10% to 4.7%. In 2016 alone, the economy added 2.15 million jobs. Moreover, beginning with the end of the Bush recession in 2009, the economy added 15.6 million jobs. That was the best record of job creation since Bill Clinton’s second term.
After the ACA was implemented, 20 million formerly uninsured Americans obtained insurance during the Obama years. The uninsured rate was reduced from 18% to a record low of 8.6%. Does that sound like the end of America to you?
Inflation and interest rates remained low during the Obama presidency.
REPUBLICAN PREDICTIONS OF DOOM IN 2020.
Perhaps the craziest prediction of them all came from Donald Trump. No surprise there. In 2020, Trump prognosticated that if Joe Biden won the election: “(S)tocks will crash, retirement accounts will vanish and an economic depression the likes of which you’ve never seen will engulf the nation.” Trump’s prediction is just the tip of iceberg — many other Republicans are making similar prognostications. It’s almost like the Republicans are hoping that the country fails.
As usual, Trump is wrong. Since President Biden took office, the economy has created a record 3 million jobs in just 5 months. In contrast, the economy created 60,000 jobs per month in the last 4 months of the Trump Administration. The U.S. is projected to reach its pre-pandemic unemployment rate by 2023 — several years quicker than the average advanced economy. On July 23, the Dow increased by 200 points and closed above 35,000 for the first time in U.S. history.
The reality is that the country is much better off under Democratic presidents. We Democrats need to message that again and again and again. We sure can’t count on the “liberal” mainstream media to do it for us. If not us, who? If not, now when? We need to take our message of accomplishment to the American people in 2022. If we do that, I’m confident that we will win. Now let’s do it!