Friday, September 25, 2015

Mr. Trump is Wrong - America is Great Now


Donald Trump says "The American Dream is dead."  His campaign slogan is "Make America Great Again." The Republican front-runner is only one of a chorus of GOP leaders who talk of the current situation in America as terrible and getting even worse.

This is wrong on just about every objective measure.  And even the things that are bad are much better than they were seven years ago. The trend for climbing out of the ditch we were in then is very good.  And the improvements that we have made - most notably in health insurance - are positive goods.

David Brooks notes that the current pessimism of Republican leaders is at odds with the normal optimism about the future that the American conservative tradition has held.  He wrote "the pessimism grows from a sour, overgeneralized and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation."

2 comments:

Barry said...

We just reeached the milestone of 58 straight months of positive job growth which is the longest string since WWII. This gloom and doom talk is called " sitting the agenda of the debate", and it resonates well with men over 50. The "Ebola scare" etc during the 2014 is an example of this tactic

Mac said...

And yet the number of truly unemployed Americans (not the gun decked figures coming out of DOL) are still in the double digits. Employment at McDonalds for an unemployed computer programmer may look good in the statistical reports, but probably not to the "new" employee. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.