For the past eight-soon-to-be years the US has been under Republican style economics.  My question, what good has it done?  Conservative blogs or other on-air strategists don’t really touch this issue.  The President really likes to tout the “we created X number of jobs last month” but when you look at the overall picture he really hasn’t created that many jobs then when he first started as President.  One accurate statement would be that ‘job growth’ has slowed during his Presidency, and doesn’t show any signs of increasing in the short or long term.

I find, based on visual observation of the market around me, that the conservative/Republican theory of trickle down economics can’t possibly be working, if wages haven’t increased and prices keep increasing.  I don’t even work, and since I’ve started buying milk myself over the past 4 to 5 years I’ve noticed the price of milk rise around $2 here in Southern California.  Furthermore those who have seen there wages increase don’t make up a majority of Americans, some say just the top 10% of Americans with the top 1/10th% of Americans making the most.  The presumption for those who have had their wages increase, that they would then reinvest that extra dollar in the American economy, either hasn’t happened or if it has it hasn’t helped those majority of Americans who still toil in economic sluggishness.

Some glorified expert that doesn’t really have a name will say that the Federal Reserve compounded the problem by influencing the economy through it’s control over the Federal Funds Rate, or an interest rate which is mostly taken up by banks when they lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other institutions.  This allowed banks to lend money to individuals at lower cost to the individual, and in turn the economy did grow, but again not overall.  The lending allowed the economy to jump start but immediately after this occurred the Reserve hiked up interests rates again, eventually the bankers hiked up their interest rates on the loans they had previously given out on what they perceived the low Federal Funds Rate.

Being scrupulous bankers, most of the loans they handed weren’t the stable ‘we’ll take your money but not that much’ loans with fixed interest rates.  Instead the bankers wanted to squeeze the most profit they could out of those they lent to, so a lot of the loans they handed out were the ‘we’ll take your money and charge you extra if we get charged extra’ through an increase in the Federal Funds Rate.  And who can blame them for wanting to make money?  Even if it doesn’t seem ‘nice.’  Therein, when the Federal Reserve raised interests rates quite abruptly, the banks panicked and raised those interest rates for the loan types I just mentioned in the latter.  Many people couldn’t afford the new payments and suffered the consequences.

While this loans crisis doesn’t affect many Americans, it truly does have a trickle down effect but probably not the one this conservative regime intended for (one could also argue it would also become a trickle up effect rather then downwards, as, how far down a person one go if there loosing their house).

In the end I want to know what has been the achievement of these Republican economic policies, the iPhone?  All that reinvestment and all we got was this lousy iPhone.

If one were to come up with statistics offering that the overall economy has improved and the people are making more and that all is good and happy, then why have oil prices risen?  Why are foreclosures increasing, home sales decreasing, job growth slowing, commodity prices increasing?  If a good portion of Americans are better off, but another portion of America is worse off, then why are we promoting such an economic policy that lifts up some and drags down others, widening the lower/middle and upper/middle classes even further?

What country are we United, but that which we are instead, and more truly, divide under?

Finally, what should be the solution?  Tax the people into oblivion, or tax cut the government into nonexistence?

I find that the answers to these questions cannot be found with the current riff and raff in Washington.  There complete ignorance to the affects of their policy making, on both sides of the Blue/Red divide, has hurt America more then helped.  The fact that a noted Harvard economist projected that the costs of our War in and Occupation of Iraq will costs $3,000,000,000,000 (that’s 3 trillion for those that majored in Miracles instead of Math) by time’s end, doesn’t exactly help our economic situation much.  I mean shit… what have we as a country, as a peoples, accomplished in the last 20 years that hasn’t been eroded in the last 8?  We can’t even kill or capture the one guy who actually commanded the only attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

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