Friday, November 13, 2015

The secret history of GOP mythmaking: How the Republican Party abandoned facts in favor of propaganda

The secret history of GOP mythmaking: How the Republican Party abandoned facts in favor of propaganda

"Directed at the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo asked the following: “In seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?” Since the Reagan years, the notion that Republicans are somehow more fiscally responsible and better at creating jobs and economic growth than Democrats has proven to be as stubborn a myth as the idea that the founding fathers were Christian zealots like Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. (They certainly were not.) The economy is an extremely complicated subject, and there are countless variables that go into how it performs, but since the Second World War, the data is quite clear: The economy performs significantly better when a Democrat is president."