Josh Barro, Columnist

The Republican Autopsy and the Empathy Gap

The Republican National Committeeâs recent report on fixing the party runs 100 pages, but if you want to know why it fails, you need only read Page 5.

March 19, 2013 at 7:31 PM UTC

By Josh Barro

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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The Republican National Committee's recent report on fixing the party runs 100 pages, but if you want to know why the report fails, all you need to see is this statement on Page 5: "We are the Party of private-sector economic growth because that is the best way to create jobs and opportunity. That is the best way to help people earn an income, achieve success and take care of their families."

There are two flawed and unaddressed assumptions in that statement. One is that Republican policies create more private sector economic growth than Democratic policies, an outcome we haven't observed in recent decades. The other is that economic growth will flow through effectively to rising standards of living, even though since the 1970s gross domestic product growth has strongly outpaced wage growth.