Republican party of business?

Many people vote for Republicans because they’re the party of business. Not since Eisenhower has this been true. Let’s look at the facts. 

Between 1933 and 2020, we have had 14 presidents, seven Democrats and seven Republicans. The American economy grew at an average rate of 4.6% under Democratic presidents and 2.4% under Republicans. According to a CNBC report, the economy grew three times faster under Biden than under Trump.

Ten of the last 11 recessions occurred during a Republican administration. The last three Democratic administrations created 50 million jobs. The last three Republican administrations created fewer than zero jobs, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.

Republicans have exploded the national debt, while the only administrations that have balanced the nation’s budget in the last 60 years have been Carter, Clinton and Obama. Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus, which he squandered by giving massive tax cuts to billionaires and funding two wars. 

President Biden decreased federal spending and reduced the federal deficit, while creating five times as many jobs in two years as the last three Republican Presidents combined.

Despite their rhetoric, Republicans destroy small businesses while propping up huge monopolies. The livelihoods of small communities—and thus rural states such as Montana—depend on small businesses. 

This dissipated when President Reagan chose not to enforce antitrust laws and instead gave massive tax cuts to billionaires and giant corporations, leading to a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people into the pockets of billionaires. This transfer of wealth has continued to this day, without benefiting our rural communities.

The Republican majority Supreme Court has also contributed to the demise of small-town businesses. Republican members of the court have accepted lucrative gifts from billionaires that have business before the court and thus perpetuated unlimited spending by the wealthy in our body politic, besides the corruption it creates. 

The Citizens United and Buckley cases created an avalanche of unlimited spending and less taxes for the wealthy and the politicians dependent on them. Jeff Bezos' income tax rate from 2014-2018 was less than 1%; in 2025, Amazon paid 1.4%, while the average tax rate for Americans was 14.5%.  

Unfortunately, the Reagan “trickle down” theory of federal spending to our rural communities has not worked. The funding under Republicans stopped with the wealthy and didn’t trickle down to our local communities.

No matter how strident Republicans will object to my analysis, the facts are undeniable. The Republican Party today is not the party of Dwight Eisenhower. 

For middle-class working families, especially in rural states like Montana, voting Republican today means voting against your own interests.

David R. James, Eureka, Montana