Rand Paul says his secret to success is that his tax cut plan will supercharge economic growth. Jeb Bush says his secret to success is that merely by being president he will supercharge economic growth.
I guess I have to give this round to Paul. He at least tried to come up with some math salad to justify his belief that a Rand Paul presidency will bring about economic nirvana. Bush simply declared ex cathedra that he’d make the economy grow at an astonishing 4 percent per year. Why? “It’s a nice round number. It’s double the growth that we are growing at. It’s not just an aspiration. It’s doable.”
Um, OK. He gets points for copping to a sort of amiable idiocy, I suppose. But in case you’re interested, here’s economic growth since the Reagan administration:
Reagan managed 4 percent growth four times in eight years. George H. W. Bush managed it zero times. Bill Clinton did it five times in eight years. George W. Bush did it zero times. Barack Obama has (so far) done it zero times. And no president in history has averaged 4 percent growth over the course of his presidency. No one.1
If you want all the gory details, Matt Yglesias has much more here about just how unlikely this kind of growth is. But politically speaking, the details aren’t what’s interesting. What’s interesting is that Bush’s comment is an unusually clear peek behind the curtain, one that demonstrates how unseriously Republicans take the economy. It’s all just cotton candy for the gullible. Cut taxes on the rich and this will—somehow—supercharge the economy. Slash regulations and this will—somehow—unleash business activity and supercharge the economy. Now Bush has decided to dispense with even the mumbo jumbo explanations. He’s distilled the GOP economic message down to its essence: Elect me president and—merely because I’m a Republican and I say so—I’ll supercharge the economy.
And there’s more. If you assume the economy is going to skyrocket, there’s no need to address niggling concerns about spending or budget deficits. There will be money for everything! And when it doesn’t happen? Oops. Sorry. Next time we’ll get serious for sure. Honest.
1OK, OK, it’s true that FDR did it. How? By starting at the bottom of the worst depression in history and ending with the biggest wartime boom in history. This basically makes the case for just how unlikely this is to ever happen again.
