The 1st & 2nd of Many Reasons to not vote for the GOP: National Defense and Economic Policy

I am reading Henry Kissinger's book World Order and it is a staggering recitation of the base fact that building a Democratic Nation in the Islamic Middle East was doomed to failure, but he likes Bush II and refused to be even remotely critical of his Iraq choices preferring to highlight another base fact that the American electorate is conflicted between idealism and realism and swings between the two.

And that is why I am no longer a neoconservative.  While I believe in a strong national defense, we have to use it wisely and only when their is a clear path to a goal.  We cannot get caught in quagmires and put troops into places from which they cannot extricate themselves.  And we cannot be in a position of forcing them to determine which civilian is a civilian and which civilian is a terrorist or armed combatant.  That will inevitably lead to mistakes, turn the population further against us, and increase the instability and the violence our troops face.

So we while we need to contain Jihadists, we need to do it with the world and we need the Islamic World to be part of the solution.  And today I read that U.S. jets are bombing Syrian oil fields because ISIS is still exporting oil.  To whom?  Assad?  Turkey?  There are no other choices and why are they buying oil from ISIS.

But believe it or not I set out today to write about economic policy, so I will change the heading to 1st and 2nd.

If you deport 2% or 3% of the labor force you will send the economy into a recession.  Just as when you shrink the pool of capital, you create a recession.  This is because economic activity is the creation of capital and labor.  To grow, you need increasing capital, and at a minimum, growing productivity of labor, and if that is not happening, a growing pool of labor.  If you shrink the labor force by deporting 11 mm  people, you will shrink the labor force by at least 5 mm people.  There are 122 mm full time workers and I estimate another 20 mm part-time workers.  So deporting 5 mm workers shrinks the labor force by 3.5%.  And consumption will go down by 3.5% (11 mm/319 mm residents).

So if you shrink the labor force by 3.5% and consumption goes down by 3.5%, and millions of homes are suddenly vacant without rent being paid, you will create a negative economic feedback loop and a recession is guaranteed.

And meanwhile, the GOP conservatives all want to balance the budget and create a hard money anti-infaltionary central bank focus.  But they will cut taxes and government spending to balance the budget.  They ignore another basic economic fact, the way to prevent a recession from becoming a depression is fiscal stimulus and loose monetary policy because if there is no increase in demand, there is no inflation and there is no economic growth.

As far as I can tell, the GOP candidates want to emulate Herbert Hoover's policies and send the economy into a tail spin not seen since 1928.

And if you shrink the labor force, you reduce the income being taxed for Social Security and Medicare exacerbating their funding shortfalls and putting retirees income and well being at risk.  So the GOP are not proposing a set of polices that will enhance retiree entitlements.

So, both National Defense and Economic Policy are reasons to vote against the GOP and for whomever the Democrats nominate no matter what their flaws because this incoherent set of GOP policies must be stopped.