Krugman resurveys the GOP's economic thinking of the past six years, which has swirled with portents of rocketing interest rates, prognostications of the dollar's collapse, and of course prophecies of "runaway inflation" and "bankruptcy." His set-up is more comical than the punchline: "But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening."
The Seventeen Wise Men & Lady persist in the party's economic stand-up routine, which only gets funnier. Scott Walker's solution to recent market turmoil was to "cancel the planned visit to America by Xi Jinping, China’s leader"; Chris Christie's response was, says Krugman, "almost" coherent but quintessentially wrong; and Donald Trump's reaction was classic, reactive Donald Trump: "he simply declared that U.S. markets seem troubled because Mr. Obama has let China 'dictate the agenda.' What does that mean?" asks the Nobel Prize winner whose specialty is international economics. "I haven’t a clue — but neither does he."
Krugman concludes emphatically: "If one of these candidates ends up in the hot seat the next time crisis strikes, we should be very, very afraid." Naturally I would be, but I'd less afraid of their emergency economics than of everything else (especially Supreme Court openings and American firepower being at their disposal).
For the empirical truth is that Republicans become modest Keynesians once they become president; it happened to Eisenhower, it happened to Nixon, it happened to Reagan as well as George H.W. and George W. Bush. All manner of fail-safe mechanisms kick in during times of economic crisis … the business community urges prudence … professional economists in white coats throw a net over the frazzled prez … and political advisers remind him that textbook Republican theory would only produce another depression, which, politically speaking, might tend to look bad.
All that GOP blabbering about Grecian bankruptcy, the dollar in free-fall and so forth? I doubt if any of the party's realistic presidential contenders (that would be two) believe a word of it. But who cares? Neither of them has a realistic shot at the White House anyway. For now, it's merely their job to frighten electoral children with grim stories of gotcha-bogiemen.
No, what makes me "very, very afraid" is a Republican Congress, or half a Republican Congress, or even a Democratic Congress with 41 Republican senators. Because it's not really the job of Republican congressfolk to give a damn about the country at large, as they have thunderously demonstrated over the past six years.
Their job is to pamper the cretinous prejudices of their carmine districts and crimson states and to gut any suggestions of sane legislative policy that might emerge from the Democratic White House. Their job is to inflict every possible pain on the American people so as (or so they believe) to reopen the WH doors for a Jeb! or a Donald or whoever the next kleines wunderkind may be. Their job is to destroy today, so that the worlds of Rhett Butler and Beaver Cleaver can be reborn.
We should be very afraid? I'm already there. But my fear has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Jeb Bush. I'm terrified of Texas' 1st congressional district — times 218.