During a speech about his new energy platform on Tuesday, Jeb Bush said he wanted to “unleash the animal spirit” of America. It was not the first time he has done this.
In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Bush told Piers Morgan on CNN that he wanted the next president to “kind of get our animal spirits up and going again.” Later, while campaigning for Mitt Romney, Bush said a Romney administration would “unleash the animal spirits of the country.”
During his own campaign for president, Bush has used the phrase multiple times. While speaking in Las Vegas this past May, he said that we as a country “have lost the animal spirits, although I think they’ll come back.” At an event last week, Bush said he thinks that “the animal spirits still exist inside of Americans.”
Why is Bush saying this? Is he a rainmaker? A practitioner of Shamanism? Or is he a proponent of liberal Keynesian economic theory?
The Bush campaign did not return ThinkProgress’ request for comment. But if one had to choose, it does seem most likely that Bush might be channeling a key tenet of John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory. That theory — largely considered liberal — argues for lower taxes, but also states that government intervention is often necessary during recessions. In addition, it promotes the importance of what Keynes called “animal spirits,” or the emotional mindsets that drive people to make investments and other business decisions.
When Bush talks about ‘animal spirits,’ he’s almost always pairing it with discussions of economic growth.
According to Keynes, people don’t take business risks based solely on raw economic data. They also must have positive “animal spirits” — emotional confidence in spite of financial uncertainty. This has been interpreted to mean that free-market capitalism is not essentially stable by numbers alone — there must be something more, something emotional, to keep it going.
Economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller assert that Keynes’ theory argues that government intervention is necessary in keeping emotions positive. “[M]anaging these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government — simply allowing markets to work won’t do it,” a description for their book “Animal Spirits,” reads.
Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told ThinkProgress that it indeed sounded like Bush was channeling Keynes. “[He] is using the word the way Keynes did — pointing out that its not just profit margins that drive investment,” she said via email.
When Bush talks about “animal spirits,” he’s almost always pairing it with discussions of economic growth. In his 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, for example, he said he hoped that the next Republican presidential nominee would “be specific about the plans that are necessary to restore a confidence in economic growth and psychologically … get our animal spirits up and going again.” In 2012, the Orlando Sentinel quoted Bush as saying a Romney administration would “unleash the animal spirits” with his plans to deregulate business and simplify taxes.
soundcloud
In July, Bush said animal spirits could be achieved by a number of economic policies: things like eliminating expenditures, simplifying the tax code, “embracing” natural gas. “All of those would unleash the animal spirits into the country and would create higher growth,” he said.
And when Bush spoke of “animal spirits” on Tuesday, he appealed to the idea of emotion. “We should stop trying to default to getting in line and being told by Washington, D.C., what to do, and [instead] embrace who we are,” he said. “We just have to unleash the animal spirits as Americans and we will be America renewed again.”
“It is ironic that he just appropriates the phrase from Keynes, without any of the theory.”
But even though he may be channeling Keynes, this does not mean that Bush is a secret Keynesian, Folbre said. His actual economic policies are just too different from those that Keynes would propose. While Kenyes believed government spending could boost the economy during a recession, Bush was staunchly against the 2008 economic stimulus package, telling the conservative publication NewsMax that former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s support for it was “unforgivable.”
In fact, Folbre said it is “ironic” that Bush is echoing the famous economic theorist at all.
“Still it is ironic that he just appropriates the phrase from Keynes, without any of the theory,” she said. “Keynes believed that an economy that relied on animal spirits alone would never be stable. Hence the need for public spending.”
Even if his proposed policies are not those of the liberal Keynes, it’s at the very least intriguing that Bush might be indirectly espousing one of his key ideas on the campaign trail. Or who knows, Folbre said — he could just be unaware of what he’s saying at all.
“He probably thinks that animal spirits are what drives a successful football team,” she said.