The "Economist" Is Not Amused: The Fraudulent "Shining City" of Today's Republicans
Rituals of delusion: Simi Valley, today’s Republican orthodoxy, and craven grifters worthy only of contempt…
The London Economist travels into the Heart of Darkness that is the Republican Reagan-ranch stronghold of Simi Valley in southern California. It finds strange Republican economic rituals, a landscape where inconvenient facts are ignored, the plain reality of the situation denied, and analysis disappeared and replaced by applause lines: a party united by nostalgia, grievance, and a refusal to reckon with any form of policy arithmetic as they pursue the entrenchment of plutocracy and the stoking of ethic, religious, and cultural grievance.
The Economist’s reporter writes:
Economist: The fantastical world of Republican economic thinking <https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/06/02/the-fantastical-world-of-republican-economic-thinking>: ‘FEW ECONOMICS conferences open with a burst of patriotic ceremony…. “I always wondered what the shining city on the hill looked like and it’s pretty cool to see it,” quipped Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve governor. The Reagan National Economic Forum…
You get a definite sense of contempt—utter contempt—swimming an inch below the surface here—and not just from the “fantastical world of Republican economic thinking” headline-writer:
In this dreamy setting… air of unreality… clubbish atmosphere depend[ing] on an amiable refusal to engage...
Item #1:
Turning a blind eye…. Mr Warsh… and French Hill… chairman of… House financial services…. Johnson… Nixon and… Reagan all pressed Federal Reserve chairs to cut rates, they note. But they swerve the fact that Mr Trump’s public threats to fire Mr Powell… go further…
Item #2:
Stick to crowd-pleasing classics. Chris Wright… secretary of energy… red meat… fossil fuels…. Alaska, he joked, faced greater sanctions on its energy production than Iran under the Biden administration. But Mr Trump’s tariffs, which Mr Wright did not mention, are a headache for the energy industry…. The souring picture for global growth and rising production… price of oil [down] from $80 per barrel in January to just $60…. Working oil and gas rigs… at its lowest level since 2021…
Item #3:
The thickest air of fantasy lingers over the subject of tax, spending and borrowing…. The Tax Foundation… expects that the [new Trump] law will increase America’s cumulative budget deficit by $1.7trn by 2034, even after… slightly higher growth… before any rise in borrowing costs…. [Gary] Cohn complain[ed]… spending never returned to pre-pandemic norms…. The new administration [did] inherited a deficit worth 6.3% of GDP… almost two percentage points larger than… 2019. But the deficit grew during Mr Trump’s time in office too...
And yet the reporter sees:
Veteran and insurgent wings rub[bing] along well enough when it comes to economic goals. All are excited for a combination of tax cuts, deregulation and drumming corporate wokery out of American business. Reliable lines for laughs, cheers and consternation from the audience include attacks on the antics of communists, whether those that reign in Beijing, or in San Francisco…
With the coda:
Blaming the Democrats will wear thin as the administration’s months in office become years. For Reagan it was always morning in America. For the modern Republican Party, it is past time to wake up…
I suppose my first reaction is to over-egg the pudding by adding to the contempt. Gary Cohn told an awful lot of lies in his day in the first Trump Administration as to what the likely growth consequences of the Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut were likely to be. He was one of the principal architects of a cut in taxes on capital that managed to have next to zero positive effect on the incentives to invest in America. That was an extraordinary act of policy malpractice. He was at the core of it.
And his complaint and excuse for the fact that Trump-Thune-Johnson are trying to blow up the deficit again? That Biden did not cut the deficit. In Cohn’s mind, Democrats are supposed to cut the deficit—after all, Obama did Clinton did, and Carter did. You have to go back to John F. Kennedy, assassinated 63 years ago, to find a Democratic president who did not succeed in reducing the deficit while in audience. (By contrast, every single Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower has seen the deficit increase during their term in office.)
It’s not fair! So says Cohn. Biden was supposed to make tough choices and cut the deficit so that we could blow it up again and party! He didn’t do that!
Well: call the WAAAMBULANCE.
My second reaction is, as I wrote back in 2019:
Brad DeLong: Passing the Baton <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/03/hoisted-from-%C3%BEe-archives-2019-passing-%C3%BEe-baton.html>: ‘Looking to the right of the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party, we see rubble. Then we see more rubble. And more rubble. Beyond that, rubble. And then, at the far end of the political spectrum, what former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can only call the American version of a 21-st century neo-fascism <https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006293127X>, devoted to entrenching plutocracy and stoking ethnic and religious hatreds, with which a great many people who ought to know better are making accommodation…
That seems to be confirmed, in spades.
And yet this attracts the votes of half of Americans who bother to vote—and a larger fraction of those who do not.