The Patriot Post® · Democrats Panic Over Economic Recovery
Two years ago, we explained why a good economy is bad for Democrats. Long before any notion of shutting down the economy to mitigate a contagion, Democrats were pushing for recession because it would help their political prospects. They didn’t get the recession they wanted in 2018, though they did ride their Russia-collusion hoax to take back the House. The recession has come in 2020, however, so a former economic adviser to Barack Obama recently laid out the new danger for Democrats: “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.”
Jason Furman said that back in early April, but Politico just reported it yesterday. Furman, now a Harvard professor, was warning fellow Democrats about the prospects for a fast and substantial economic recovery from the Great Coronavirus Shutdown.
According to Politico, “Furman’s case begins with the premise that the 2020 pandemic-triggered economic collapse is categorically different than the Great Depression or the Great Recession, which both had slow, grinding recoveries.” We’d like to note a great irony that, naturally, Politico ignored: Democrat policies greatly exacerbated those downturns and slowed the recoveries. FDR’s New Deal worsened the depression, while Obama’s heavy-handed regulatory and tax regime had our economy stuck in low gear for eight years.
On the other hand, President Donald Trump brought lower taxes and less regulation, putting our economy on exceptionally strong footing and making the U.S. more resilient in the face of calamity. Where would we be right now if COVID hit during the Obama economy?
The “partial rebound,” Furman warned, “can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business.” He added, “Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
Frankly, we’re not quite “V” optimistic because so many small businesses are going out of business and even big companies are reeling and will be slow to recover. Still, we do see evidence pointing toward a substantial rebound ahead and we think the sheer numbers of recovery will be stunning and encouraging. “Q3 may be the single best GDP quarter since regular data,” says Larry Kudlow, head of the White House National Economic Council. And Furman predicts, “You could easily have one to two million jobs created a month in those four reports before November,” as well as perhaps “double-digit positive economic growth” just ahead of the election. “These will be the best jobs and growth numbers ever.”
Furman’s prognostication certainly serves to, er, pull off the Democrats’ mask. They’re moving the goal posts on continued lockdowns and screaming that Republican governors will have “blood on their hands” for reopening because their entire election pitch depends on the U.S. plummeting into a depression. A “V” recovery would spell disaster for them, while it would obviously be fantastic for America. And doesn’t that about sum up the real issue here? What’s good for America is bad for Democrats, and vice versa.