When we watch or read the daily news we are focused on current events. There is no discussion of the long-term big picture in politics or economics. It is informative to look at the economic records and accomplishments of our political parties. Party policies are presented here to give the reader a more complete and accurate understanding of the United States’ economic record. This is not a thorough exhaustive account, but intended to present significant policies and positions. In the last century, communism was tried and failed. Uncontrolled capitalism was tried and failed. Today the world has moved to the successful systems of controlled capitalism and capitalistic socialism.

INFLATION

In 2022, Republicans have based their campaign on blaming Democrats for high inflation. But they never address the basic causes of inflation in 2022. Biden has not caused inflation and Republicans do not have realistic proposals to reverse inflation. Here is a list of relevant inflation facts you will never hear from Republicans.

• – Inflation is lower in the US than in other countries.
• – It is impossible for Biden, or Democrats, or the US to cause worldwide inflation.
• – Corporate profits and CEO pay has gone up drastically and passed these on to consumer prices.
• – The US is making more oil than it uses.
  • The US is an oil exporter – (producing more oil would not reduce inflation).
  • OPEC sets oil prices; US does not set oil prices.
• – Employment is at a record high and wages are rising – (no recession).
  • High employment and wages are drivers of inflation.
• – The Federal Reserve has kept interest rate unusually low (contributing to inflation).
• – The dollar in international currencies is stronger than it has ever been.
• – The drop in Russian oil and the war in Ukraine have contributed to inflation.
• – Covid disrupted supply chains and production – (contributing to inflation).
• – The national debt has little relationship to inflation. Increasing the national debt has never led to inflation.

THE OVERALL ECONOMY

The US economy has always done better under Democrats. One reason for this is that Republicans cut taxes for billionaires while Democrats are raising the minimum wage for the working class. The Republican concept of trickle-down has never helped the overall economy and adjusting the minimum wage for inflation has never hurt the economy.

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Republicans vs Democrats
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THE KANSAS EXPERIMENT

Sam Brownback, the Kansas governor, was convinced that implementing tax cuts for the wealthy according to Republican policies would boost the Kansas economy. He eliminated taxes on certain business profits and lowered the top rate of income tax by 30%. This experiment was a disaster and after a few years had to be repealed. The Republican theory of “trickle down” did not work for Kansas and has never worked. However, it was successful in giving more free money to millionaires.

Kansas revenue plummeted and led to deep cuts in vital services and in closing schools. Kansas employment dropped in agriculture, aircraft manufacturing, and energy. State employees dropped by 4%. The experiment in Republican economic polices was a big failure.

And yet, Republicans continue to demand more tax cuts for the rich, which does nothing but give millions to the super wealthy while increasing the national debt. Payments on the national debt are made with your money. Republican fiscal policies of tax cuts for billionaires have never helped the economy nor the working class.

FREE MARKET OUTLAWED

Free market competition provides incentives to keep costs low. However, there is little, if any, competition in the US healthcare system. It is next to impossible for the consumer to shop around for the most cost effective and customer-friendly provider. If your physician sends you to Good Luck Hospital, you don’t argue and demand to send out an RFP (Request for Proposal) to local hospitals asking them for bids on your brain transplant operation. Also, you do not do a search on Indeed.com to interview anesthesiologists or LVNs. Health Care is a profit-driven industry that does not operate in a competitive free market. This lack of competition is a main reason US health care is much higher than any other country.

In 2003, Billy Tauzin, a Republican Congressman from Louisiana, was the Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the chief architect of the Medicare Drug Bill. The Republican priority is the profits of the drug companies. The affordability of drugs sold to the public is not a primary concern. So, Tauzin allowed the drug companies to write the Medicare Drug bill. That’s right, Billy gave the henhouse keys to the foxes.

The easiest way to guarantee enormous drug company profits is to eliminate any obstacles to competitive drug pricing. So that’s what the drug company lobbyists did when they wrote the Medicare drug bill. This bill made it illegal to negotiate for lower drug prices as it is done by the VA hospitals, by HMOs, and by other countries in the world. The Republican bill prevented Medicare drugs from being competitively priced. This is the opposite of what Republicans are always preaching: free markets and competition will keep prices down. Yet Republicans outlawed the competitive markets for Medicare drug prices. The drug companies were so grateful to Billy Tauzin for handing them billions of dollars of your money that Tauzin was hired as the chief drug lobbyist at $2 million per year. Thanks to the Republicans, the enormous drug profits and Tauzin’s compensation eventually comes out of your bank account.

The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 was passed on November 11 of that year. 82% of Republicans voted for the bill that prohibited free market drug pricing while 76% of Democrats voted against the bill. Ever since then, Americans have been handing over billions of their hard-earned wages to drug companies for no reason other than Republicans voted to ensure their wealthy sponsors would continue giving them campaign money.

ECONOMIC DISASTERS

1929

The great Recession of 1929 was the largest and longest economic collapse in US history. GDP declined by 27%. Unemployment rose to 24%. There were several causes for this collapse, but the two major causes were the irrational speculations in the stock market and the Republican tariff bill of 1930.

Extreme speculation is always followed by a sudden bust. A famous example of this is the Tulip Bulb Mania of 1636. People sold all their farm animals and possessions to buy a single tulip bulb. Then suddenly the value of tulip bulbs crashed back to a few dollars. Many people lost everything. A similar situation occurred in the US onion commodities market in 1955. In this case, two commodity speculators were able to intentionally manipulate the onion market. This resulted in bankruptcy for many onion farmers. To avoid this happening again, Congress outlawed the speculation in onions. Today onions are the only commodity in which speculation has been outlawed. The Glass-Steagall act was passed in 1933 to outlaw a recurrence of investment bank speculations.

In addition to unregulated speculation, the 1929 problems were exacerbated by the Republican Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. These Republican tariffs crippled a large percentage of international trade and therefore the economy.

The Trump tariffs of 2018 also negatively affected the economy. The Trump tariffs resulted in nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products, which is equivalent to one of the largest tax increases in decades. It also caused many farmers to declare bankruptcy. Trump was forced to bail out these farmers with government hand-outs. The Trump tariffs also caused prices to increase thereby contributing to inflation.

2008

Republicans always opposed the 1933 Glass-Steagall limits on bank stock market speculations. Republicans managed to get Glass-Steagall repealed. This was one of the main causes of the Great Recession in 2008. The US economy experienced a financial collapse second only to the Great Depression of 1929. A primary cause of this recession was the Republican repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act.

To prevent future repetitions of this disaster, the Wall Street and Consumer Protection act (Dodd-Frank bill) was passed in 2010. This was a revision of the Glass-Steagall Act that had been repealed. Dodd-Frank restored the limits on investment bank speculation. It prohibited banks from using customer deposited funds for speculative investments.

CONSUMER PROTECTIONS SHUT DOWN.

Dodd-Frank also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau is tasked with the responsibility to “promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services“. Senator Elizabeth Warren had proposed the CFPB and would have been appointed to run the bureau, but Republicans refused to support her nomination. Republicans opposed the existence of the CFPB and refused to support any nominee to run the bureau.

In 2020 the CFPB received 542,300 consumer complaints about financial company violations of financing regulations. This included things such as false finance advertising, illegal fees and interest, and credit report mistakes. The CFPB has forced the biggest financial institutions to return $12 billion directly to 29 million consumers they cheated. The CFPB has been a great success in protecting consumers

Republicans put corporate profits above consumer protections. The most strident Republican opposing consumer protection was Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney repeatedly railed loudly against consumer protections and tried to get the CFPB shut down. So of course, Trump appointed Mulvaney to head up the CFPB. Mulvaney did everything he could to suppress consumer protections.

He terminated investigations into illegal activities by lending companies. He stopped collecting fines and stopped hiring employees. Mulvaney terminated consumer access to online complaints and set the CFPR budget request to $0. Under Mulvaney, enforcement actions dropped to a quarter of their previous annual averages, and consumer complaints rose substantially

Mulvaney scaled back an investigation into the Equifax data breach, relaxed restrictions on predatory payday lenders, and dismantled financial protections for the military. After he took over the agency in April 2018, Mulvaney hired eight of his associates. He created new positions for them and gave them raises.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned to protecting consumers after Trump lost the 2020 election.

HEALTH CARE

When Republicans were working on a replacement for Obama Care, the idea of government-run Public Option Insurance was proposed. Republicans stated publicly that they were strongly opposed, not because “all government programs are inefficient”, but because the non-profit government program would be too efficient and would cost Americans less, thereby reducing corporate profits. Republicans always put corporate profits above American workers.

Universal Health Care started in 1883 Germany and was gradually adopted by nearly all countries by 2000. US health care was first proposed by President Truman in 1945. The US has proposed universal health care several times since 1945 and it was always defeated or filibustered by Republicans.

Private health care in the US is burdened with multi-million-dollar incomes of upper management, with corporate profits, and with the highest drug prices in the world. It is the only health-care system in the world with billions of dollars spent on staff needed to deal with dozens of different insurance companies and with complicated billing systems. As a result of these high costs of health care, many cannot afford health care and lose their homes and their life savings. Polls have shown that other countries have a higher degree of satisfaction with their health care than Americans do. As long as Republicans can block health-care reform, Americans will pay a lot more for health care than other countries do.

US Health Care Overhead
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NET NEUTRALITY REPEALED

Network Neutrality is the operating principle that the Internet be treated as a utility like the electric power system. All of us can plug in a toaster or a TV into an electric outlet and be charged the same rates regardless of who the user is. Utility companies charge the same rates for all residential consumers.

In 2015, Democrats, under Obama, passed regulations that required Internet services to provide equal quality and pricing to all consumers. However, Internet providers wanted to be able to adjust the quality and pricing for different users in a way that would maximize their profits. So, in 2017, Republicans, under Trump, repealed the Net Neutrality regulation. This allowed corporations to adjust their rates and service any way they wanted to. In 2018, California was forced to pass a Consumer Protection bill that kept the free Net Neutrality internet available to Californians.

BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH DEMOCRATS

Democrats are terrible at election campaigns. Democrats have refused to inform the voters of these Republican fiscal policies that oppress the working class. Republicans constantly attack Democrats with lies while Democrats refuse to expose these facts about Republicans. While Republicans are experts at manipulating public opinion, Democrats refuse to expose all the Republican policies of putting the wealth of corporations and billionaires above helping the working class.

Democrats could prove that the 2020 election was not stolen by reminding the public of the 60 polls, including Fox News polls and GOP polls, that predicted the exact Biden percentage of votes. The polls prove there was no fraud. Until Democrats change their ways and start informing voters of facts like these, they will struggle to win elections.

The statistical data shows that economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans. Republicans have consistently protected the interests of wealthy class above that of the working class.