Daily Clips: November 11th, 2015
The GOP is living in a fantasy world: For those of you who tuned into last night’s Fox Business “debate,” you’ll know that every single one of the candidates peddled the same-old trickle-down platforms. Less regulation, more tax cuts = economic growth! Amanda Marcotte at Salon summarizes their flirtation with economic fantasy:
The continued popularity of Donald Trump and Ben Carson clearly sent a signal to the rest of the field that primary voters simply hate reality, particularly when it comes to economics, and will swiftly punish any candidate who feeds them anything but soothing, if ridiculous fantasies.
She’s right, but the denial of reality was apparent within this party long before Trump and Carson showed up. In the face of decades of economic research, these corporate puppets continue to dish out the same economic treatments with slightly different language. If the American people are not smart enough to see that, they may win this election in 2016.
Ben Carson lied about the minimum wage: In last night’s debate, Carson claimed that “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.” PolitiFact rated this as “False” and concluded, “it’s not at all clear that a minimum-wage hike was the primary culprit for the periods in which joblessness rose, since those periods also coincided with broader recessions in the economy.”
The 8 weirdest economic ideas from the GOP debate: There were some doozies:
1. The Fed should stop controlling interest rates
2. The TPP is a Chinese conspiracy
3. The Fed caused the 2008 crash by raising interest rates
