Four Deformations of the Apocalypse

[MormonHero]

David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is working on a book about the financial crisis.

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.

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. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

 

[DawnInTexas]

David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is working on a book about the financial crisis.

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. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

Modern Republicans?

Finances are the responsibility of our Congress. The Question should be: In recent years-Just what did the Democratic House & Democratic Senate under (Republican) Bush, and the Democratic House and Democratic Senate under (Democratic) President Obama do about the new policy doctrines?

God Bless.
+Jesus, I Trust In You!
Love in Christ Jesus, Dawn

 

[NotCrazyDan]

It’s always amazing to me how liberals believe that they can increase taxes and have no effect on the economy, and if there is an effect, somehow it will not impact tax revenues. Raising taxes will have a depressing effect on the economy, and will result in less tax revenue. Doing it in the middle of a hard recession is incredibly stupid. If they want to balance the budget they should act like adults and cut spending.