Remember "It's the Economy Stupid?"

Back in the day, they say, they had a big sign up in the Clinton 1992 presidential campaign headquarters: "It's the Economy Stupid!"

The idea, I assume, was that while all the people that politicians talk to are grifters and hangers-on, the voters are just thinking about the price of meat at Safeway this week and whether wages are keeping up with prices.

Oh and you'd better not mess with my Social Security and Medicare.

But I say that Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021 ignored that golden rule. Obama's stimulus package in 2009 was all about throwing money at teachers and setting up Obamacare rather than restarting the economy after the generational Crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The same is true of Biden's early stimulus package and subsequent "infrastructure" and Build Back Better packages. They had nothing to do with getting the economy on track after the disruption of the COVID scare. They were all about servicing elite Democratic constituencies and their demand for loot.

I suppose it is natural for the monarch in any regime to live in the bubble of his court, and not really pay enough attention to the real world outside. In the last few days, for instance, I have been writing about the willful failure of our ruling class to grasp the importance of the work of Charles Murray, that Great Society programs don't work and that the economy is favoring high IQ workers and really hurting ordinary average folks without standout talent.

My point is that, before the rulers hand out the goodies to their supporters, as all regimes have done since the dawn of time, they need to make sure that the Commoners and the peasants are doing OK.

And I would say that the Bidenoids are clearly acting as though the overall health of the economy, as experienced by ordinary Commoners, is not something that lordly courtiers need to concern themselves about.

I was reading Ben Stein at The American Spectator and he was talking about his dad.

Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was instrumental in helping the U.S. shift from a wartime economy to a wildly prosperous peacetime economy.

He served as a LTJG in the Navy, and then on a series of commissions and committees that planned how to get from huge wartime deficits under FDR — and rightly so, of course — to a sustained balanced budget peacetime economy[.]

Imagine that! The powers that be were thinking about how to transition from war to peace! And the result of their work was this:

I'd say that the reduction of federal debt from 1945 to 1980 was pretty decent. I'd say that the ruling class had its eye on the ball. But obviously, not since then.

I'd say, looking at the chart, that we are in for some unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in the next few years. The job of a ruling class is to make sure that any unpleasantness is confined to court circles and that it should not impacts ordinary Commoners and peasants.

Of course, that is to say nothing about the green agenda -- that I regard as a combination of ruling-class fashion parade and ruling-class moral preening. Greenology was referenced recently over at WattsUpWithThat in respect of how our greenie friends are in the early stages of turning the economy upside down in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable resources. They call it "deep decarbonization." As an engineer that worked for a while in electric generation planning, I am here to say that these chaps have no idea.

More than that, I say that our greenie friends are sending the economy off a cliff and you have no idea what we are going to experience when we hit the rocks at the bottom.

Except that fortunately the Germans are going to hit bottom first. And give us time to deploy our parachutes.

For those of us that have parachutes.

I don't know what the bottom line is for ignoring the "It's the Economy, Stupid!" My guess would start at losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But what do I know?