Krugman: Don’t Empower Republicans
When Krugman was howling about Bush, or Iraq or any non economic issue over the past few years it was always welcome, simply to have a front line voice say such things — most of the press being such enablers of disastrous policies. When he howls about that which he knows best, economics and the road to depression, our hair ought to stand on end.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.
… Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.
“It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.”
Krugman
Obama began to use the bully pulpit in his address to the Energy Department yesterday, some of which made it into the news.
‘Let me be perfectly clear: those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They have taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they have brought our economy to a halt. And that’s precisely what the election we just had was all about.”
He needs to do it a lot more, more publicly and until things get moving..
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February 6th, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
GOP unpatriotic, economic terrorist insurgents! So why does the GOP hate America? My inference from Krugman’s warning below, pointing out the recovery plan is too small.
In fact as I understand the history of FDR, he needed an even more robust spending program, that created jobs and improved the economy for seven years. Then he relented to the GOP and reduced the spending, at which point the economy started to sink again. The lesson was that he needed to stand firm and continue more long-term spending to produce jobs, to turn around the economy. And in fact it might be that we did not have the mythic need for a war to serve as the engine for our economy. War produces unproductive, useless assets that have only one purpose - destroying things, and themselves.. Not like tractors that can be used for construction of roads, schools, building at home. So I would say we need to be committed to a long-term Keynesian strategy to grow the domestic side of our economy. And we need less Keynesian spending on the Pentagon side (63% of GDP approx.), and ultimately less on the financial sector side. Welfare for the rich and the Pentagon should not be an option. Where’s all those Citizen Groups Against Pentagon Waste, and Against Wall Street Waste? Can we finally shrink Wall Street, and the nuclear ossified pentagon? Maybe its time to return to the FDR 90% tax on high income brackets, and start repatriating all of that non-taxable offshore money squirreled away in loopholes under the corrupted Internal Revenue Tax Code. This would go along way to Fund America FIrst, as the corporate GOP patriots should espouse on behalf of all their destitute and struggling constituents. Maybe then their constituents could get a little so-called “pork,” like schools, health care, decent roads, and resilient electrical service, homes, and community banks with integrity, and fair loans, and a green local economy with local power, clean water, clear skies - you know, all the stuff their Senators and representatives are calling pork. Unless of course its a bank bail out. That’s not pork, is it?
The last paragraph of Krugman’s article.
“It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge. ”
Jack Kaplan