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| This Republican Economy By PAUL KRUGMAN What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams. So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed. For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con. What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/opinion/...onomy.html?_r=1 |
| QUOTE (earthmother @ Jun 4 2012, 10:26 PM) |
| Correct me if I'm wrong (I know I can count on you to do that! :good: ), but I thought statistics show that the big spenders since the '80s have been the Republicans, not the Democrats. I believe Reagan and both Bushes outspent (when adjusted for inflation) Clinton and Obama, made gov't bigger, and did all those things that Reps. supposedly revile and Dems. love. |