The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-17-2020, 07:40 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Actually, the problems with conservatism today and in circa 1929-32 are much the same, for the same reason. Covid is severe in the USA because Trump tore down government programs created to deal with pandemics, and expected states to cure it on their own without funding and instead of a national mobilization. And the economy never really recovered for many people from the great recession brought about by the same trickle-down, free-market policies that caused the great depression. Government is not the solution; government is the problem. Destroy the administrative state. Trump is the final failure of Reaganomics, which was the final development of Coolidge and Hoover policies.

I would say you are right at a high level.  In the Guilded Age and recent unraveling, the conservatives did not want to use government to solve the problems of the time.  The specifics?

In the Guilded Age, the theory was that the government did not attempt to regulate the economy.  In the recent recession, they favored voodoo economics and trickle down.  Spend and debt in good times and bad.  The result was the same, periodic collapses.  There were depressions periodically in the Guilded Age, and the “It’s the economy stupid” and Great Recession in more recent times.

But the COVID collapse is due to COVID, not economics.  I am no fan of trickle down Voodoo.  Still, it is good for a term and at least half of the second.  The collapse came early and for different reasons.  The getting out will be different too.