We knew it then; we have the proof now. Paul Krugman adds up the numbers.
During the campaign, Mr. Romney accused President Obama of favoring redistribution of income from the rich to the poor, and the truth is that Mr. Obama’s re-election did mean a significant move in that direction. Taxes on the top 1 percent went up substantially in 2013, both because some of the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire and because new taxes associated with Obamacare kicked in. And Obamacare itself, which provides a lot of aid to lower-income families, went into full effect at the beginning of 2014.
Conservatives were very clear about what would happen as a result. Raising taxes on “job creators,” they insisted, would destroy incentives. And they were absolutely certain that the Affordable Care Act would be a “job killer.”
So what actually happened? As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012. ...PaulKrugman,NYT
Nice. We've gotten used to the psychology of the right -- a tangled mess. On the one hand, conservatives like unemployment. To hell with what it actually does to people and their children: it satisfies the conservatives who embrace the belief that the underclass is lazy, doesn't want to work. Meanwhile, they find unemployment numbers useful as a political weapon. Go figure!
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Oh, and all this is causing a merry moment of fisticuffs featuring Jeb ("the cold leftover") Bush and Donald Trump, who's no hero.
Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong. ...PaulKrugman,NYT
Thing is, Trump's a jerk but he does have the ability to make his Republican adversaries look and act like much worse jerks. I think he's in the race quite deliberately as a spoiler. Could be wrong about that, but no matter. As long as he continues to reveal the flaws on the Republican side, he's doing just fine.
