If the Sky Is Not Falling...

If you have entered the Chicken Little stage of human development and spend your time running around warning people that the sky is falling… you have a vested interest in calamity. If you predict that the sky will fall and the sky doesn’t fall, you look like a fool or a liar or a fraud. If you, a seasoned and somewhat dotty politician, announce that a specific tax reform bill will bring about Armageddon… you have an interest in precipitating the arrival of Armageddon.

At a time when the news on the economy seems very good indeed, and where the worst predictions about the Trump presidency have not come to pass, you can understand why Senate Democrats are trying to change the narrative… by shutting down the government. If their action can help bring about an economic collapse, they will happily rush out to the microphones and blame Trump. They will happily announce that they were right all along.

This morning Bret Stephens, having found sobriety, points out that the Democratic Party strategy of indulging in rhetorical hyperbole while predicting the imminent end of the world is a gamble on catstrophe.

In December this column warned that hysterical opposition to the Republican tax bill was a fool’s game for Democrats that could only help Donald Trump. Yes, there were things to dislike in the legislation, from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.

But it was not the moral and fiscal apocalypse its critics claimed. And its central achievement — a dramatic cut in corporate rates to 21 percent from 35 percent — was an economic no-brainer that many Democrats, including President Obama, had supported (albeit less steeply) just a few years ago.

Apple will not be the only multinational that will soon bring back gigantic profits to take advantage of new low repatriation rates. Microsoft holds $146 billion in overseas earnings, Pfizer $178 billion, General Electric $82 billion, Alphabet $78 billion, and Cisco $71 billion, according to estimates from the Zion Research Group. The total stash is about $3 trillion — by one measure nearly three times what it was just a decade ago.

Assume that just half of that money comes home to the United States. It’s still the equivalent of Canada’s entire gross domestic product. Not too shabby, especially considering all the hyperbolic predictions of economic doom that went with Trump’s election.

Democrats, Stephens continues, did not realize that the Obama economic recovery was anemic. They tried to run on prosperity at a time when the nation was not enjoying prosperity. Normally, they would have assumed that they could manipulate American minds to make them think that the economy was better than it was. Somehow or other, the propaganda machine failed. They seem to believe that they were outwitted by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. A strange idea, indeed.

Democrats entered the 2016 election cycle on what they thought was the back of a strong economy. It wasn’t. Barack Obama presided over the weakest expansion in postwar history. The economy grew by 15.5 percent from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2016. During the (slightly longer) Reagan boom of 1982-90, it grew by more than 38 percent. The failure to understand this meant a failure to appreciate the depth of American discontent. It helps explain how Hillary Clinton lost her unlosable election to a man whose central claim to office was that he understood business.

If the economy has improved under Trump, the Democrats have been running around saying that it’s all because of Obama. Considering that one major impetus of economic growth has been Trump’s dismantling of the regulatory state that Obama empowered, it’s a difficult case to make:

More recently, Democrats have convinced themselves that Trump is merely the beneficiary of Obama’s economic legacy. But how can the critics who previously assured us that Trump’s election would cause certain calamity now explain that he’s nothing but a lucky bystander to forces beyond his control? Had the economy tumbled over the past year his critics would surely have blamed him. It’s ill grace to deny him all credit when it’s doing so well.

“ill grace”… whatever would have made anyone imagine that the Democratic Party lacks grace or graciousness.

Apparently, Democrats are hoping that they can derail the economy and the stock market by shutting down the government. And yet, they have dug in their heels and hope to damange the economy in order to protect illegal aliens. It seems like a bad wager, especially since illegal immigrants themselves do significant damage to the economy:

Yet one gets a distinct sense that Trump’s relentless critics would rather bury the Apple news or look for the cloud within the silver lining. This is not a good look. If making confident but lousy predictions is one form of political malpractice, wanting things to fail is another.

The same goes for the looming government shutdown, which may have begun by the time you read this column. Democrats are placing a large bet that it’s a political showdown they can win. But what they are mainly doing is wrecking their chances of retaking the House or Senate by appearing to put the interests of DACA’s immigrant “Dreamers” ahead of the rest of America.

And, of course, rooting for the president to fail is also rooting for America to fail. Most Americans still have enough patriotism to revile anyone who seems to be trying to make America fail again:

… normal Americans — that is, those who hold the outcome of the next election in their hands — do not want him to fail. They want statesmanship, not schadenfreude.

Wouldn’t it be smart of all of Trump’s opponents to show they are superior to him in the former? And wouldn’t a good way of doing that be to abjure the latter, even if it sometimes means giving him some credit?

To be fair and balanced, Democrats and progressives do not really care about how the economy fares, this quarter or next quarter. They are playing a longer game. Their arena is not the marketplace of goods and services but the marketplace of ideas. They are fighting to control the American mind and to undermine traditional American culture. They are fighting for diversity. They worship the gods of multiculturalism. 

To their minds, victory consists in the election of a transgender state legislator in Virginia. They have declared war on merit and want people to be judged, not on the content of their character, but on their race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preferences. Then they go to war against any American who uses derogatory language. They will give you the economy if you let them control your mind and your speech.

Think about it. The economy is moving ahead. The stock market is moving ahead smartly. The Democratic Party thinks that the world is about to come to an end because Trump called a few nations shitholes.