On a post about over at Naked Capitalism on Mark Ames: why the American right never liked Naipaul, Sundog's comment reminds us that even Republican-leaning economists are beginning to fret about the outlandish positions taken by the (today) mainstream GOPers (the quoted excerpts are incomplete and out of order here):
The sad fact of the GOP and the American right more generally is that they're dedicated to destroying the legitimacy of government, organized labor and any form of collective action other than industry lobby groups and what drifts from the miasma of an apocalyptic middle-eastern death cult.
Mike Lofgren might be joining the club [of Republican economists recognizing the problem]. Apparently he’s a Republican with long years in DC, working as staffer on both House and Senate budget committees.
Raising the debt ceiling isn’t, as the GOP tries to say, Congress giving itself permission to continue excessive spending: It’s something that’s necessary to pay for past congressional decisions on taxes and spending, and those decisions were made primarily when Republicans were in charge. "Borrowing and spending the GOP way"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lofgren-budget-republicans-20110626,0,7490630.story
Talking about the seeming inability of Dems to act strategically to show up the Republican greed-and-stupidity of "either I get my way or we burn the house down", Mark Thoma over at Economist's View, in The Number of Vacancies in Top Economic Posts is Stunning, has this to say:
Republicans are running around with matches threatening to start new fires if they don't get their way, and the administration seems to think calm, rational negotiation in the face of all of this will somehow win the day instead of allowing Republicans to take them to the cleaners yet again.
Obama and handlers--are you paying attention? The debt ceiling should never become a crisis, since the spending legislation should always carry with it, as it did under Gephardt, the necessary borrowing implied by the amount of spending and the revenue projections. Republicans' use of the extremely harmful results of a US default to try to get their way on cutting 'entitlements' (meaning the social programs that were instituted in the New Deal for the benefit of ordinary people) and never asking Big Business and its wealthy owners and managers to ante up a penny more (meaning that we will continue in fact the disastrously growth-reducing policies of redistribution upwards instituted by Ronald Reagan with his reliance on the 'free market' economic theory that favors investors over everybody else--George W. Bush's 'haves and have-mores' ) shows just what color their patriotism is--it is a vivid royal blue attuned only to the wealthiest 'investor class' amongst us. Negotiating with people carrying torches in hayfields is not a workable approach. Crazy and irrational people who don't care if they burn down the entire country in order to get their way aren't capable of making wise decisions for the common good. Figure out a way to put them in their places, show them up for what they are, and get the American people to understand just who is willing to sell the majority out in order to placate their investor-class masters.
Recent Comments