[Previous entry: ""George Bush is our fate""] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Ultimate DIY gun project"]

10/27/2006 Archived Entry: "Another leftist gets it"

MORE AND MORE I'M STRUCK by the fact that a lot of leftists "get it." Like this guy, Joshua Holland.

Do I agree with his assertion that, "[T]ruly limited government is an anachronism. Perhaps it was appropriate in a time when small stakeholders toiled away in an agricultural economy, but it's simply impossible to govern a complex, modern, populous society like ours without a lot of staff"? Nope. No way. Guy oughta read up on some chaos theory if he imagines that vast social systems benefit by vast central governments. I disagree with lots of his specific views.

BUT virtually every word of his article shows that he understands the economic fraud the R's have pulled off for the last decades and the fantasy of the American people that has fed the fraud and been fed by it. Instead of parroting the standard (and obviously absurd) claim that R's want to "slash" government down to nothing, he nails the fact that the R's use faux libertarian rhetoric to connive their way toward giant government.

It's a series of boldfaced economic lies, actually, based on the carefully crafted separation of spending and taxes. The rebel conservatives' favorite statistic is that under Clinton, the government grew by 3.4 percent annually, and under Bush it's "exploded" -- a word that's ubiquitous to the genre -- to an average of over 10 percent each year (for some reason, they never mention that government spending increased by 9.75 percent annually under Saint Reagan).

But they never discuss his tax cuts. They've enriched a tiny über-wealthy minority enormously, without doing anything to stimulate the economy. The cost, of course, is a tab the kids will have to pay -- massive deficits that legendary former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan called "unsustainable."

The idea that Americans can have their big government cake and eat their tax cuts too is nothing more than a scam on a huge scale that's been perpetrated for forty years. It's left voters dizzy. Public opinion about budgets and taxes at Pollster.com is a tangled mess of contradictions. By 66-31 Americans think reducing the deficit is more important than getting tax breaks and by 2-1 they think the Bush tax cuts haven't done anything to help their own families, but by 58-30 they approve of the cuts anyway and by a margin of 50-35 they want them extended. It's psychotic.

Posted by Claire @ 09:04 AM CST
Link