"We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression"
About this Quote
“Single worst recovery” is less a data claim than a political weapon dressed in the lab coat of empiricism. Laffer isn’t offering a careful benchmark; he’s trying to close the argument before it starts. “I don’t care how you measure it” signals contempt for the usual referees: GDP growth rates, employment-to-population ratios, productivity, wages, participation. That line is a tell. It’s not confidence in the numbers; it’s an attempt to preempt methodological disputes by implying that any metric you choose will indict the same villain.
Then comes the geographic roll call - East Coast, West Coast, North, South - a stage-managed sense of national unanimity. It’s the language of a stump speech, not a seminar, designed to convert a contested economic narrative into something like common sense: everyone sees it, so only elites would deny it. The repetition of “knows it” works as social pressure. If you question the premise, you’re not just wrong; you’re willfully blind.
Context matters because Laffer’s brand is supply-side economics: the story that growth is being choked by taxes, regulation, and government overreach. Framing the recovery as historically awful invites a particular cure - sharper tax cuts, deregulation, a smaller state - while shifting attention away from structural headwinds (deleveraging after a financial crisis, weak demand, global slowdown) that don’t fit his preferred prescription. The Great Depression comparison is also rhetorical escalation: it borrows catastrophe to make incremental disappointment sound like crisis. The intent isn’t to diagnose; it’s to delegitimize the status quo and clear the runway for an agenda.
Then comes the geographic roll call - East Coast, West Coast, North, South - a stage-managed sense of national unanimity. It’s the language of a stump speech, not a seminar, designed to convert a contested economic narrative into something like common sense: everyone sees it, so only elites would deny it. The repetition of “knows it” works as social pressure. If you question the premise, you’re not just wrong; you’re willfully blind.
Context matters because Laffer’s brand is supply-side economics: the story that growth is being choked by taxes, regulation, and government overreach. Framing the recovery as historically awful invites a particular cure - sharper tax cuts, deregulation, a smaller state - while shifting attention away from structural headwinds (deleveraging after a financial crisis, weak demand, global slowdown) that don’t fit his preferred prescription. The Great Depression comparison is also rhetorical escalation: it borrows catastrophe to make incremental disappointment sound like crisis. The intent isn’t to diagnose; it’s to delegitimize the status quo and clear the runway for an agenda.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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