Monday, August 2, 2010

Truth Teller


Saying the obvious, Ronald Reagan's own budget director (David Stockman is still alive? Who knew?) calls out Congressional Republicans. To people with fingers in their ears, saying "la la la la la" as loud as they can, he argues:
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

The article, which appears in NYT online next to an ad (when I first saw it, anyway) showing Fred Thompson asking for help in keeping the Bush tax cuts (because god knows we need to help the rich actors, for the good of... the rich actors) also says:
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. [Emphasis mine, but it should be everyone's.]

Okay, yeah, the Keynesianism dig is aimed at Democrats. Nevertheless, it's refreshing, if also amusingly ironic, to have the guy who engineered the first shot at destroying fiscal responsibility under wrongly-revered Ronnie Reagan speak up now. A few decades too late, but still...

Andrew Sullivan, among the last thoughtful conservatives writing in public, had this to say after reading Stockman's piece:

No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America's fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.

But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.


Such reality-based thinking, of course, has been and will always be thoroughly rejected by the RWS™ and their teabagging fodder.


7 comments:

  1. Pssst Sid...
    its your own Muslim President who intends to continue the Bush Tax Cuts for everyone except me, I mean people making over $250,000/yr.
    You'll still be payin your 25% rate, unless your chillun' have an intervention and get you to leave this mortal coil this year when the estate tax is "ZERO".
    Next year it goes up to 50%, they even did a "Law and Order" episode with that as the motive for murder.

    Of course, you could practice what you preach, and send Uncle Sam a check for all the Taxes you didn't pay thanks to Bush/Chaney...

    Bueler?? Bueler??

    Frank

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frank, you're starting to sound like Blue, which is really sad. Same memes, same, uh, inversions, no redemptive humor. (Okay, you tried, but it was the SOS.)

    I'll give you this, though: you might be the only RWS™ who admits the D plan is only to raise the rates on the highest earners. To hear the rest of them, including those in congress who actually know, the plan is to raise taxes on everyone.

    You might have noticed, if you hadn't already turn on the gas, that Stockman specifically addressed the taxes on the "nation's wealthiest taxpayers."

    Funny, isn't it, that "congress" is also a term for screwing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So why don't you send the IRS a check???
    I mean, if the Bush Tax Cuts were so unfair/destructive/racist/sexist/ho-mo-phobic.
    You can pay MORE than you owe, its when you don't pay enough the meany-frowny guys with the shiny shoes show up:(
    Hmmm don't tell me you spent it already.....
    Bueler?? Bueler??

    Frank

    ReplyDelete
  4. Your Blog IS boring...
    which is why my Soon to be Published as a Coffee Table Book Blog gets 10X the hits.
    Only reason you even get the traffic you do is people like MY contributions...
    Side Bar, I watched "Religulous" this weekend... pretty funny, I'm thinkin about goin A-theist.

    Frank "I get it, you don't support the Bush Tax Cuts, but your keepin the Money" Drackman

    ReplyDelete
  5. Once you go "A" there's no other way.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Drekman...(TaxesBeUponHim)...Finally!

    Worried about your right wing kids intervening are you? What a "chillun" thought.

    "Only reason you even get the traffic you do is people like MY contributions..."

    The flea says "this dog is mine."

    "you might be the only RWS™ who admits the D plan is only to raise the rates on the highest earners"

    Ooops...Forgot the TP

    EugeneInSanDiego

    ReplyDelete

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