Skip to main content

Comment rescues: Perry and the eternal question: where is the opposition plan?

Perry Hood responding here today:

I think you feel stampeded, because Obama's package is not to your liking. Fair enough! What do you suggest?


Perry Hood responding here even earlier today:

Where is Pat Buchanan's plan? He hasn't one! So he is just one more of the Dr No's we see popping up on opposition side. This is no help!!!


Perry Hood responding yesterday at Down With Absolutes:

Dominique, now that you have expressed everything negative, what do you suggest that Obama and the Dems do about this economic crisis that is getting closer and closer to being a full blown depression?


You'd think, viewing the world through the perspective of these comments, that we have a modern Diogenes, replete with lantern, looking for someone who will rise above petty politics and offer an alternative to the trillions and trillions of dollars of spending to prop up an economic system that is horribly broken with strategies that worked (or not) seventy years ago in a world without FDIC, OPEC, WWW, NATO, EEC, and lots of other letters besides WPA, NRA, or CCC...

You'd think that nobody has offered information from reputable economists, or proposed alternative measures.

The funny thing is that Perry knows this isn't true.

On February 10, following several days of extensive posting on the complex non-linear system that is our economy, and followed in the past two weeks by criticisms based on Congressional Budget Office studies, commentary by Jeffrey Sachs and other prominent economists, I offered the outlines of an alternative for dealing with the current meltdown.

Wow--it offered the idea of restructuring financial markets to break up horizontal and vertical corporate monopolies to rebuild the economic firewalls destroyed over the past few decades; providing direct support to States to deal with those worst hit by unemployment or lost medical insurance; and separating the stimulus packages into its constituent elements for individual consideration. The tax cuts I supported were far more modest and far more tightly targeted than those of the administration's stimulus proposal.

I provided extensive documentation over multiple posts, with which someone could take issue, but, surprisingly, Perry didn't:

Steve, your solution regarding creating walls in order to address the messes two and three problems sounds logical to me, although I don't feel informed enough to say much more than that. I agree that a good part of the problem seems to stem from a blurring of the lines between traditional bankers, investment bankers and other Wall Street manipulators/entities.

I am concerned about how we will help the unemployed; leaving that up to the states, with their federal infusions, might be enough, I'm not sure. Perhaps some of the states will use the infusion to balance their books, therefore not incentivized to do the necessary cost cutting; and then there is the question of what is left over to help the unemployed.

On mess one, I like the idea of reductions in the payroll tax, since that goes directly to some of the folks who are being hurt the most. However, I suspect that this will not be an effective creator of jobs. Direct aid to states makes some sense too, although again, the impact on creating jobs is not clear, as this will depend on what the states do with their money grant. On the other hand, I support the elements of the Obama plan which goes to so-called shovel ready infrastructure building, because of the obvious creation of jobs.


[Note: Perry's last point was refuted by a CBO report that i discussed in detail a week later. Perry seems not to have seen that one; at any rate he didn't comment.]

So not only has an alternative been offered here, Perry, you went on record as agreeing with substantial parts of it--even though you seem to have ... forgotten that part.

You have offered engaging insights and shown the willingness to admit that part of President Obama's plan is a massive gamble with our future.

And you're certainly free to disagree with anything we offer.

But please, stop suggesting that libertarians here have not been discussing solutions, and that our responses in any fashion resemble those of the GOP apologists who have only a simplistic mantra of tax cuts and no serious economic analysis to back it up.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...