Live by Repug Economics, Die by Repug Economics

So, the bubble is finally bursting in the no-union, low-wage, no-benefits, no-social-safety-net states like Texas and South Carolina. Their faked-up economies are crashing, unemployment is skyrocketing, families are plunging into chaos and they can't see the obvious reason why.

David Atkins, thereisnospoon, at Hullabaloo:

In a sense, this is what happens when societies try to give away the store to corporate interests in the hopes of driving massive growth. When times are good, times can be very very good. When things start to crash, the growth times during the boom can tend to buoy a society for a little while. But when things start to really go south, things go very, very badly--to say nothing of the fact that handing communities entirely over to the whims of the "free market" increases the likelihood and frequency of major downturns. And worst of all, when things do go sour, those societies have hollowed or nearly destroyed the social supports that allow their economies to weather the economic storm.

SNIP

It's a similar phenomenon to the storied Baltic Tiger and Celtic Tiger economies (to say nothing of the Icelandic Tiger) that the Right harped on so much throughout the aughts, but about which they are now eerily silent. Those nations used regressive tax policies and anti-regulation policies to artificially inflate themselves during the boom, and they're now suffering economic calamity.

The fact is that slow, steady, equitable, sustainable and broad-based growth outside the financial and housing sectors, with a good safety net to help the unemployed stay on their feet is far preferable economically (to say nothing of environmentally) to rapid growth in volatile industries followed by major economic shocks, with few social supports for the unemployed. The former helps almost everyone, while in the long run the latter is beneficial only to the top 1% and their friends.

It's an old story that proves once again just how bad for the economy conservative policies are. But it seems that humanity is destined to forget that lesson time and time again.