The Republican descent into treason began with Ronald Reagan and his deplorable “Reaganomics.” At the forefront of this philosophy were three big lies: helping the rich get richer would inevitably help everyone else; markets were inherently self-correcting and therefore there was no need for government regulation; and the U.S. did not need an economic strategy because that was a natural consequence of the free market.
In 1981, the Republican Party embraced plutocracy and ushered in a thirty-year period where America’s working families were abandoned in favor of the rich. Inequality rose as middle class income and wealth declined. As corporate power increased, unions were systematically undermined. As CEO salaries soared, fewer families earned living wages. Reaganomics produced a warped and brittle U.S. economy, where more than two-thirds of our GDP was housing related: building, buying, and furnishing new homes or borrowing against existing homes in order to maintain a decent standard of living. In 2008, when the credit bubble burst, the debt-based consumption model failed, taking down first the housing sector and then the entire economy, resulting in catastrophic job losses…
From that point on, Republicans did everything they could to prevent economic progress. Republicans became “the Party of No” and blocked every Democratic proposal to boost the economy, lower the unemployment rate, protect the longtime unemployed, and reduce inequality. In the face of this, President Obama with the support of the Federal Reserve nursed the economy back to health: the stock market boomed and unemployment was reduced below 6 percent. In 2013, the federal budget deficit was a reduced to a third of the size it had been in 2009.
