I really don’t think it’s possible to believe that Joe Scarborough is stupid. The man has a law degree. Scarborough served four terms with distinction in the U.S. House of Representatives as a “New Federalist” Congressman from Florida, earning a 95 percent conservative lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union and received a “Friend of the Taxpayer” award from Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform, and signed the Contract with America. Scarborough was also one of the 228 Republicans who voted to impeach Bill Clinton.
Today Scarborough is co-host of MS-NBC’s Morning Joe with his third wife, Mika Brzezinski. However, this man of many talents also authored three published books and played with his band Dixon Mills on their album Calling on Robert E. Lee (nice race-baiting title, right?). More recently Scarborough produced what might be the worst music video available on YouTube, New Age garbage titled Mystified. Be forewarned before clicking the link: it’s five minutes and twenty-three seconds of your life you can never get back. I took one for the team, just so you wouldn’t have to watch it yourself. While watching it myself I was reminded of Opus the penguin’s classic review of Benji Saves the Universe in the comic strip Bloom County, a movie he described as “simply bad beyond all dimensions of possible badness.” For whatever reason, the words “We are not men. We are Devo” ran through my brain.
Against the Left: A Ro...
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Joe Scarborough has an estimated net worth of approximately $25 million dollars and makes $8 million dollars a year, in spite of having two ex-wives and six children to support. It’s really surprising to think that Scarborough might be economically illiterate, but the alternative would be that this former conservative Republican congressman sold his soul for the almighty dollar when he transitioned from serving our nation to servicing his personal bank account. Yet that seems to be the most reasonable explanation for him to make such a stupid claim as to say that Trump’s economy is worse than Jimmy Carter’s infamous “year of malaise” in 1979 or Bill Clinton’s GDP of 2.7 percent in 1995. Of course the numbers are accurate (Scarborough isn’t that stupid) but anyone who has taken an introductory course to economics (that would be me) can tell you that a snapshot in time is useless, and cherrypicked numbers can be very misleading, especially if that is the intention of the analyst.
Seriously, only a low-information voter or a fan of Morning Joe might get fooled by such sophomoric thinking. All it takes is digging into the numbers just a little deeper and noting the trends. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to remember events from a historical perspective. Shall we?
Okay, let’s start with Jimmy Carter. Yes, it is absolutely true that U.S. GDP in Carter’s final year was 3.2 percent with total annual revenues of around $2.6 trillion dollars. However, GDP per capita (Gross Domestic Product divided by total population) was only $11,700 per person. Radical Iranian terrorists invaded the U.S. embassy and had been holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days causing gas shortages and rationing. Carter gave a speech imploring Americans to adjust their thermostats to endure hotter homes during the summer and to wear sweaters during the winter. America was in a funk because Jimmy Carter was a weak president, and that’s why he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. For a complete and accurate picture of the economy as a whole, employment numbers should be looked at as well, but I’m reticent to bombard the reader with too many numbers and statistics at once… when it happens to me and the numbers start to bore me, my eyes tend to glaze over and I get sleepy. But I encourage the reader to evaluate the employment trends over these same periods that are being discussed in regard to GDP.
