HashTag said:
Ahhhh... so your a Republican never Trumper then?
Tell me, exactly what makes the Tea Partiers so wacky?
I ask this as a staunch Libertarian.
This will take a long response, so bear with me. I lean Libertarian on social issues as well. However, the evidence from the world of Macroeconomics does not support the Tea Party approach to the Great Recession (which formed from the government's response to that crisis). This is stuff you will find in ordinary surveys in textbooks such as Mankiw (former chair of Bush 43's Council of Economic Advisors) and Krugman (Nobel prize winner and leading public intellectual).
The Tea Party was inspired and formed after a rant by Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago exchange on CNBC. Their basic line of economic reasoning is that the Gov. checkbook should be managed like an ordinary person's finances. Thus, if the Gov. income goes down, the budget should be cut to balance and that there should be no bailouts or special deals because ordinary persons don't get those. While this sounds great from an emotional perspective (matters of a person's checkbook are always emotional), big picture macroeconomic world does not work that way. Macroeconomics is the study of national and international economy wide interactions and relationships. Microeconomics is the study of individuals and their economic decisions (size does not matter and it looks at mega corporations and ordinary people the same way and makes few distinctions because they are still individual actors). These two parts of the study of economics have different rules and if you confuse the two and apply micro principles to macro and vice versa, you will get wrong results and analysis (just like you can't combine Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics. They are both accurate, but Einstein only applies to large bodies of matter and Quantum only applies to the world of subatomic particles. You must apply them to their proper areas only).
In a horrible demand shock like the Great Recession (which was caused by a financial crisis and those always make for a much worse downturn and longer recovery), demand drops off a cliff and interest rates approach zero and in some cases, go effectively below zero as judged by yields on certain bonds (German for example). At this point, there is no incentive for an individual (whether a real person or corporation) to spend money on investments which actually grow the economy. The danger in this is it can cause deflation, which is way worse than inflation and much harder to cure. GDP is composed of consumer spending, business investment spending, government spending, and exports minus imports. During the Great Recession, consumers and businesses were cutting back and of course that affects exports, so the only entity that could spend was the Government. Also, money was basically free with interest rates being so low. There are two tools that can be used to combat recessions: fiscal policy and monetary policy. Fiscal policy is the government's taxing and spending powers (managed by Congress). Monetary policy is the expansion and contraction of the money supply (managed by the Federal Reserve according to congressional statute). Ideally, both should be used. The Fed deployed monetary policy cannons like never before, but dumping money into an economy with interest rates close to zero or effectively below really doesn't do much because you can't make persons (real and corporate) spend to increase GDP. The money just sits there in electronic accounts and not used effectively. The government can spend however, and the GDP formula does not care where the money comes from, it only cares about the total spending outcome.
The Government can deploy money in two ways: tax cuts or spending. The problem with tax cuts is that they go to the people that generally already have money and they will tend to save it. Nothing wrong with that individually, but in the case of an economic disaster, we need that money spent to restart the heart of the economy (just like you would pump blood and fluids into a trauma patient in the hospital). I used my check from the government to pay down debt in the early 2000s recession, but the purpose of those checks sent out to people was for them to spend it (my debt being paid down did not help the current economy because those transactions had already been counted). We call this idea the Paradox of Thrift and it illustrates how the worlds of Macro and Microeconomics are very different. Free enterprise economics is based on the idea that society overall prospers when we all make decisions in our own financial interests. However, if we fear a recession coming and all cut back on our spending and increase savings (these are individually virtuous decisions), we actually are causing harm to the overall economy and can create a self-producing recession. So, if you applied a micro principal of balancing the government's check book during the Great Recession (or Great Depression or any other eco crisis), you would actually be making the patient worse (equivalent to bleeding the trauma patient instead of putting fluids in him or her). Europe overall went down this path and it created their sovereign debt crisis (also because the Euro transition was poorly designed) and made for a much slower recovery than the US. We did do a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, but the $800 billion was the largest amount that could be passed politically and economists were warning that this would not be enough to bridge the output gap that had developed. A huge infrastructure plan could have put all those construction workers back to work and created a renewed national infrastructure that would still be with us to day and the long-term economic impact in increased productivity would have paid for it with the record low interest rates (Just like TARP made a profit and saved the banks which eventually helped us recover).
The Trump economy is growing at a no greater trend rate long term than Obama's. You can look online and see the trend line. There is no huge spike of Trump growth showing something had changed. Growth has slowed back down after the effects of the sugar high tax cut went into effect (which they promised would increase growth permanently over 4%, which is has not because businesses have not increased overall their investment spending. They plowed most of it back into stock repurchases). The stock market under Obama was actually up more at this time in his presidency. The Trump economy has benefited from one thing Republicans and Tea Partiers denied Obama: fiscal stimulus. There has been big increases in government spending as the budget caps adopted under Obama have been lifted. Economists have shown if this type of stimulus had been allowed by Congress under Obama, the recovery would have been much faster. So basically, the Republicans have shown they will support deficit spending to support their president, but not a Democrat. This is hypocritical and wrong.
Tea partiers claimed the budget must be balanced: Europe went that route and in some ways they still have not recovered (especially on the periphery of the Eurozone). Trump economy gets fiscal stimulus and continues its' upward trajectory. Tea partiers claimed that interest rates should have been raised (Trump was *****ing about this during Obama, but now as President wants them down to zero last summer and fall to support an economy that he almost cased a recession in due to business uncertainty over trade policy). Tea partiers claimed that TARP was going to be a disaster, a huge loss, and rescue bad actors. It was one of the most successful economic interventions ever that saved the financial sector and prevented a collapse and second Great Depression. It also turned a profit (all this you can look up with a simple Google search). Yes, some people did not get what they deserved, but the purpose of Government is to protect the common good. Millions more people would have been hurt by the bad actions of a few without TARP. Tea partiers also said the huge increase in the money supply would promote banana republic inflation. They predicted this for years and it still has not come to pass and the actual danger has always tilted towards delation since 2008. Time and time again the Tea Party economic analysis has been wrong.
One element of conservatism is looking at the world the way it really is, not the way you want it to be (Pollyanna view). What does the evidence show? What does research and science say? This is why most conservative intellectuals like George Will, Greg Mankiw (mentioned above), Charles Krauthammer David Brooks, etc. have changed their registration to independent. The party has become an ethno-nationalist populist party like those in Europe. That is why the Republicans are overall losing the suburbs and college educated voters that last two elections in 2016 and especially 2018 (you are fixing to freak as you read that, but look it up). The party is ultimately moving towards its own demographic destruction because evangelicals and the white working class are shrinking as a share to the voting bloc. All others groups are moving towards the Democrats during the Trump takeover. This greatly saddens me because my party of the party of George Bush (both), Bob Dole, McCain, Nixon, etc.
All this is info can be fact checked through a Google search. Remember, opinion pieces are just that unless they show sources for their opinion. And almost every time I have fact checked a right-wing article like Hannity, their facts are wrong through an easy Google search.