#93 Banana-bana-bo-blame

So I was talking to this car salesman the other day. And what surprised me was he was spouting off his political opinions. To hear him tell it, all liberals were spawn of Satan. It surprised me cause rule one in sales is to keep your religious and political opinions out of the process. The two subjects where people most often disagree have no place in bars or saleslots. And I was surprised even more because he was kind of an old codger. So when he was done blaming the liberals for the new 4-cent gas tax and ignoring the 30-cent gas price hike we had last summer that apparently had no liberal origin I asked him how long he’d been with Chrysler. “30 years,” he said. “Oh,” I remarked, “you must have worked there when Chrysler was on the ropes.” “Yeah,” he spit, “That Carter had the economy in such shambles Chrysler almost went under.”
I let it lie because I only vaguely recalled that Carter was the president that actually bailed out Chrysler. I went home and looked it up and sure enough, that’s what happened. Even though Carter personally felt that Chrysler’s failure to rise to the competitive challenge of the Japanese auto industry by making too many fuel inefficient cars should result in the same destruction by capitalist market forces that killed Nash and Rambler, industry lobbyists, union lobbyists and his economic advisors prevailed and the big three stayed three and Lee Iacocca became a candidate for president because he engineered Chrysler’s recovery. Next time I go bankrupt and have all my debts forgiven I hope to get billions of dollars in government loan guarantees to engineer my recovery too. I mean, that’s what capitalism’s all about right, no government intervention...
So it was doubly ironic that this poor embittered car salesman owed his job to the man he hated the most, Jimmy Carter. But like all people, he was very adept at making the facts fit his belief. When I was in the investment business, they called the improvement of the stock market in the eighties “the Reagan Years” and the even larger stock market and total economic surge in the nineties, “the nineties.”
If you would like to make sure you’re on the same historical interpretation page as my friend the Chrysler salesman, it goes like this: The terrible economy of stagflation of the Nixon years was the fault of the Democrat-controlled congress. The hyper-inflation years of Gerald Ford were the result of the failed economic policies of the Democratic congress. The economic malaise of the Carter years was the fault of Carter. The deep recession of Reagan’s first years in office was the Democratic congress again, the brief surge in the stock market in the eighties was due to the enlightened economic policies of Reagan, the resulting recession during the first Bush years was the Democratic congress again. The resurgence and boom of the nineties initiated by the first 2 years of the Clinton administration policies were the result of the next 6 years of Republican domination in congress. These last few years of economic disaster, when Republicans have controlled both the White House and Congress, have been the result of “factors.” A factor, by the way, is a fact that can’t be bent to fit a belief.
America, ya gotta love it.