The New Republic and similar outlets continue blaming Republicans for tanking the economy. The historical record shows a clear, repeated pattern.
During the 2008 mortgage crisis, Democrat-led pressure that began in the 1990s under Janet Reno and President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department forced banks to loosen lending standards in the name of equity. When the bubble burst, the Obama administration bailed out the very banks that had participated in the reckless lending. Wall Street executives kept their bonuses while millions of ordinary Americans lost homes and savings.
Obamacare was another massive wealth transfer to Big Pharma and insurers. Mandates and subsidies funneled hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the healthcare complex while driving up premiums for middle-class families.
Then came COVID-19. Democrat-led policies and public health overreach deliberately crushed small businesses on Main Street while supercharging the wealth of connected billionaires. Small restaurants, gyms, retail shops, and service businesses were forced to close or operate under crippling restrictions.
Meanwhile, Amazon (buy from home), Tesla (EV mandates/subsidies), Big Pharma (Obamacare & COVID vaccines), streaming giants (Amazon Prime, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Netflix, Google), internet and phone manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, Google), and bandwidth/service providers (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Quest et al) were boosted by the lockdowns and thrived. The result was one of the greatest wealth transfers in modern American history: from small businesses and taxpayers to billionaire innovators. These companies rolled the profits into space exploration, robots, drones, and artificial intelligence.
They closed schools for extended periods, inflicting massive learning loss, and closed churches, assaulting religious freedom, while keeping liquor stores and cannabis dispensaries open. As Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
The pattern is unmistakable: Democratic policies consistently attempt to manipulate markets for political gain while projecting costs onto the public and taxpayers. (Remember Solyndra?) Whether through loosened lending standards, Obamacare mandates, or COVID lockdowns, EV mandates, or even the persecution of the hydrocarbon industry on energy, fertilizer, and plastic feedstocks, the powerful get richer, and Main Street gets gutted.
Elon Musk does not have $1 trillion. He has stock holdings in companies he started and grew. Before you ever heard of him, he started and sold Zip2, developed the mechanism that birthed PayPal. Then sold the Intellectual Property, took out a government-backed Clean Energy Loan, raked in massive profits from Democrat EV Subsidies with Tesla, then created Neurolink, while inventing reusable rocket boosters and global Starlink, and is now on to xAI.
REPUBLICAN TAX CUTS MUST NOT BE BLAMED FOR RISING DEFICITS AND DEBT
When consequences are severed from decisions, fragility compounds and trust erodes.
The American people are still paying the price in lost businesses, learning loss, inflation, and eroded trust. It’s time to stop pretending these were unfortunate accidents. They were policy choices with predictable winners and losers.
Michael Breeden is a writer based in North Carolina.