Hey, GOP—Make America Solvent Again!

Here’s an idea for the GOP convention managers. How about a session themed as—

MAKE AMERICA SOLVENT AGAIN!

Of course, we are riffing on last night’s theme called “Make America Safe Again”, and surely that notion does rank right up there with Motherhood and Apple Pie. Still, we are wondering why they would wish to call attention to a statistic—the violent crime rate—which under Joe Biden in 2023 reached its lowest level in, well, 54 years!

That’s right. The violent crime rate in the US reached 347.6 per 100,000 population in 2023,  which was 10% below the 385.2 per 100,000 rate during Trump’s last year in office in 2020.

In fact, the 2023 number was so good that no previous President could top it going all the way back to 1970, when Richard Nixon famously launched his wars on drugs and crime. Accordingly, here are the violent crime rates per 100,000 population for the final year in office of each president since then.

• Biden 2023: 347.6.

• Trump 2020: 385.2.

• Obama 2016: 397.2.

• Bush 2008: 457.5.

• Clinton 2000: 506.5.

• Bush 1992: 757.5.

• Reagan 1988: 637.2.

• Carter 1980: 596.6.

• Ford 1976: 467.8.

• Nixon 1970: 363.5.

• Nixon 1969: 328.7

Overall, you might think the GOP is lost in some kind of time warp. The half-century low violent crime rate of 2023 was actually 54% below where it peaked under George Bush the Elder in 1991. But, hey, Sean Hannity and Fox News say violent crime is out of control under Sleepy Joe—so apparently the facts need not get in the way.

Then again, there may not be many Republican voters in Chicago, St Louis, Los Angles and Philadelphia worried about the elevated crime rates in these dark blue cities, but these several islands of general social and economic dysfunction might be enough to spook suburban and rural Republicans elsewhere. Still, even when it comes to this most heinous component of violent crime—murder—the stats just don’t make the case.

As it happened, the murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000 population in the US overall in 2023 accounted for just 1.6% of all violent crime. And in this case there had been a slight upward hook in the rate to a peak of  6.5 and 6.8 per 100,000 in 2020 and 2021, respectively. But even then, the 2023 rate of 5.5 per 100,000 was barely half the rate recorded from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s.