He starts where Tyler did:
President-Elect Barack Obama cautions that his economic plans will probably have the United States running "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come." Before the ink has dried on news reports of his mind-boggling concession, the Congressional Budget Office raises a red flag (PDF) and warns that the next resident of the White House is being unreasonably optimistic -- the tidal wave of red ink about to engulf the federal budget is bigger than anticipated even before taking into account Obama's plans for a "new New Deal."
It's all right, the president-to-be's partisans tell us. That vast new spending is necessary and will pull us out of recession just the way the FDR-era programs on which it's modeled saved us from the Great Depression.
From there he goes into a detailed examination of why virtually all serious modern scholarship on the New Deal (aside from Paul Krugman, who has now denounced virtually any political thought with which he disagrees to be racist) has determined that massive Keynesian-style deficit spending actually PROLONGED the Great Depression by several years.
Too long to excerpt, it's a must read.
I will give you this one taste, which has relevance to many of our liberal/progressive friends, both across the country and (surprise, surprise) here in Delaware:
Among FDR's mistakes, The Beacon's Bean points out, was demonizing everybody who disagreed with him so they hunkered down and held off making investments until he was out of office. Even John Maynard Keynes "repeatedly criticized FDR for discouraging private business investment with his taxes, regulations and overheated rhetoric (the White House charged that opponents were 'Big Business Fascists')."
Everybody in the Government Party (my new name for the Demopublicans) has a solid share in the culture of demonization.
Which makes it almost impossible to stop.
So I'm going to start tallying up the kids' and grandson's share of the New New National Debt that we're about to hand over to them because ... as a society we're too damn cowardly to fix the problem ourselves.
2 comments:
"From there he goes into a detailed examination of why virtually all serious modern scholarship on the New Deal ... has determined that massive Keynesian-style deficit spending actually PROLONGED the Great Depression by several years."
Now this poses as an objective statement when it could easily be a tendentious one. Wouldn't you have to provide a review of all modern scholarship and carefully and fairly delineate "serious" from "non-serious" scholarship before you can make such a claim, especially in italicized and bold lettering?
Unless you're going anarchist, "Government Party" is probably a term to avoid. There's a big difference from the Demopublican style governence and the Thomas Jefferson style.
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