Whose fantasy?

Here’s something guaranteed to shock and amaze you: I’m a registered Republican.

I’m not proud. In fact, it’s downright embarrassing. What on earth went through my 18-year-old mind when I registered, I might never fully grasp. But I have an idea.

I was living in Chicago, surrounded by Oprah-lovers and political arguments that made no sense. Maybe it’s just that I really enjoy disagreeing with the people around me – but I think there’s more to it than that.

I had a new-found fascination with economics – or at least what my immature freshman self’s simplified concept of economics was. I liked to think that all the liberals’ heads were in the clouds.

Sure, it’d be nice to have a minimum wage equal to a living wage and less income inequality, but these things simply weren’t feasible if we wanted our economy to continue growing at a rapid pace.

Everyone would understand this, I thought, when they got a job and entered the “real world.” For now, I told myself, they’re just collegiate daydreamers.

Instead of everyone else coming around to my superior libertarian ideas, however, I “saw the light,” so to speak, when I began working to cover the expenses of college. (Taking macroeconomics might have also helped a teensy-weensy bit.)

Often times, we liberal college students are accused of being in our own bubble, away from the “real world.” But it was precisely moving closer to that “real world” that challenged my stale taxes-are-bad, Ron-Paul-is-good economic outlook.

It seems to be lost on many in the “real world” that the vast majority of them are better off under Democratic economic policies than more conservative ones.

Not only have Democratic presidents presided over significantly more total economic growth since 1948, the real incomes of the middle-class have grown more than twice as fast on the Democrats’ watch.

Moreover, the real incomes of working poor families, defined as families below the 20th percentile of the income distribution, have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, according to the Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables.

But real-worlders have been brainwashed.

I’m assuming that most of the people who attack the economic “idealism” of college students like me on the basis of parental financial support, or our inexperience with substantial income taxes fall into the categories of middle class or working poor.

Clearly, they have failed to realize that for the past five decades, they have actually been much better off under the economic principles of the Democrats than the Republicans.

And even if they are among the affluent, their real incomes have stayed relatively similar regardless of the party in office.

The Republicans have somehow managed to convince America that they are the party of realistic economics, that Democratic principles sound nice and fair but in reality have mitigating effects on economic growth.

We’ve been trained to believe that the progressives would have us trade a robust economy for social justice.

But there’s more to the macroeconomy than the simplified Republican vilification of taxes and government spending. Yes, the arguments for Reagonmics sound nice, but empirically they have failed to deliver for the vast majority of Americans.

Perhaps those in the “real world” should focus less on the tax amount docked from their paychecks and more on their actual economic well-being.

They might find that, in reality, the Republicans are the ones living in an economic fantasy.