Who won last Monday’s verbal smack-down between the two main presidential candidates? On issues relating to the economy, it was too close to call: They both lost, each having matched the other with displays of economic illiteracy. Space limitations permit only one ignoramus award per candidate.
Consider Democrat Hillary Clinton’s analysis of the Great Recession of 2008-09. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession,” she noted, “the worst since the 1930s.” After that valid observation, she declared that the disaster “was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”
That somewhat jumbled formulation almost seemed calculated to stir class hatred. The horrors of the Great Recession must still haunt millions of Americans. As Clinton herself went on to remark, “Nine million people lost their jobs” and “five million people lost their homes.” Yet in her view, “slashed taxes on the wealthy” was a principal cause of this misery, while the “tax policies” that apparently kicked “the middle class” to the curb was a related factor.