Our culture’s support for Republican errors via NYTimes:
this point is worth emphasizing once again. As Krugman notes:
…the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit.
All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.
The entire debate has been fake.
If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.
“So the idea that those at the very top, who now are richer than anybody has ever been; we now have people who are richer than any people have ever been in the history of the world; why they can’t pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes in crazy.
“Five days after George W. Bush became president, [five days!!] Alan Greenspan testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and said ‘we are in danger of paying off our national debt too fast. We have a projected $5 trillion surplus going into the next ten years and we very well may pay off the debt too fast, the federal government is in danger of having too much money.
“Then as soon as we started losing jobs and we’re in a recession, Bush said, ‘well we’re in a recession, we need to cut taxes because the economy’s bad.’ So in addition to ‘every time you cut taxes you increase revenue’ and ‘every time you cut taxes you decrease revenue’, there was also, ‘every time the economy’s doing well you have to cut taxes’, and ‘every time the economy is doing bad you have to cut taxes.’
“And then, when it needed one more element to become absolutely dangerous, and Dick Cheney provided that. Cheney said, ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. So Bush takes the biggest surplus in history and turns it into the biggest deficit in history, hands off a $1.2 trillion projected deficit to Obama, and an economy, here it is, I’ve done my job, we’re shedding 750,000 jobs a month.
“This is the most incomprehensible economic theory I’ve ever heard.”