Louisville Courier Journal Tags GOP's "Pledge To America" "Vapid". But The Newspaper's Call For More Stimulus Spending Deserves The Tag Instead.
A vapid pledge
In their “Pledge to America,” House Republicans make sweeping promises about simultaneously reducing taxes, slashing spending and bringing the deficit under control.
If that sounds too good to be true, it's because it is. The full cost of the pledge's proposal to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts would be $3.7 trillion over the next 10 years. That's not a misprint. And, it includes the much debated $700 billion in tax cuts that the GOP adamantly insists be granted the richest 2 percent of the population. That is money for which there is no meaningful public return — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed 11 possible steps to give the economy a boost and rated tax cuts for the wealthy last.
Meanwhile, the pledge puts most federal spending — Social Security, Medicare and defense spending — off limits, yet promises to save $100 billion in the first year alone. The Republicans don't say how precisely, and the few ideas they do float wouldn't begin to make a big difference.. What else would they suggest? Reductions in food inspections? Gutting workplace safety programs? Slashing education aid, closing national parks, halting efforts to rebuild a crumbling national infrastructure?
At the heart of the Republicans' strategy is a hope that the pledge will appeal to tea party activists who believe that federal stimulus spending and bailouts of the banking, credit and auto industries have brought the country to the brink of fiscal ruin. That is a popular notion, given public impatience with the slow economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment, but it is also an uninformed and misled stance.
A cautious CBO study found that unemployment would be 0.7 percent to 1.8 percent higher — between 1.4 million and 3.3 million fewer jobs — without the stimulus bill passed at the beginning of the Obama administration. Other studies have found even more dramatic benefits. An assessment by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, and Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded in August that the unemployment rate would have been 11 percent (it was 9.5 percent at the time) without the stimulus and 16.5 percent if neither the stimulus nor the banks' bailout had been passed. Neither, incidentally, is a liberal activist, and Mr. Zandi was a backer of Sen. John McCain in 2008.
The authors of the Republicans' pledge overlook that at the time of passage of the stimulus, the housing and credit industries were in free-fall and the nation's rapidly contracting economy was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs each month.
Not everything that has been tried worked. Moreover, the stimulus arguably was too small; a good case could be made for additional government spending, not less. But at the time the Democrats took action, the Republicans, under whose watch a sound economy had disintegrated into calamity, didn't have better ideas.
That hasn't changed.
In their “Pledge to America,” House Republicans make sweeping promises about simultaneously reducing taxes, slashing spending and bringing the deficit under control.
If that sounds too good to be true, it's because it is. The full cost of the pledge's proposal to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts would be $3.7 trillion over the next 10 years. That's not a misprint. And, it includes the much debated $700 billion in tax cuts that the GOP adamantly insists be granted the richest 2 percent of the population. That is money for which there is no meaningful public return — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed 11 possible steps to give the economy a boost and rated tax cuts for the wealthy last.
Meanwhile, the pledge puts most federal spending — Social Security, Medicare and defense spending — off limits, yet promises to save $100 billion in the first year alone. The Republicans don't say how precisely, and the few ideas they do float wouldn't begin to make a big difference.. What else would they suggest? Reductions in food inspections? Gutting workplace safety programs? Slashing education aid, closing national parks, halting efforts to rebuild a crumbling national infrastructure?
At the heart of the Republicans' strategy is a hope that the pledge will appeal to tea party activists who believe that federal stimulus spending and bailouts of the banking, credit and auto industries have brought the country to the brink of fiscal ruin. That is a popular notion, given public impatience with the slow economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment, but it is also an uninformed and misled stance.
A cautious CBO study found that unemployment would be 0.7 percent to 1.8 percent higher — between 1.4 million and 3.3 million fewer jobs — without the stimulus bill passed at the beginning of the Obama administration. Other studies have found even more dramatic benefits. An assessment by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, and Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded in August that the unemployment rate would have been 11 percent (it was 9.5 percent at the time) without the stimulus and 16.5 percent if neither the stimulus nor the banks' bailout had been passed. Neither, incidentally, is a liberal activist, and Mr. Zandi was a backer of Sen. John McCain in 2008.
The authors of the Republicans' pledge overlook that at the time of passage of the stimulus, the housing and credit industries were in free-fall and the nation's rapidly contracting economy was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs each month.
Not everything that has been tried worked. Moreover, the stimulus arguably was too small; a good case could be made for additional government spending, not less. But at the time the Democrats took action, the Republicans, under whose watch a sound economy had disintegrated into calamity, didn't have better ideas.
That hasn't changed.
Labels: News reporting
posted by KYJurisDoctor at 7:50 AM
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