Sequester: Final Death Throes for Republiconomics -- and Republican Party [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/sequester-republicans_b_2706816.html

Sequester: Final Death Throes for Republiconomics -- and Republican Party
Paul Abrams
Posted: 02/17/2013 1:04 pm

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared that he has been in the House for 22 years and that we have never cut spending. This from the man who tried to spend $3 billion on an alternative jet engine the military did not want, and never specifies any of the cuts he says are required.

Now, it appears, Republicans will get their sequester. They will also, in the process, shatter any doubt that government spending indeed creates jobs, the only remaining myth that has not been thoroughly debunked by events, at least since 1937-8.

Republicans have perpetrated four major myths about economic policy, aka "RepubliCONomics." These myths have served their paymasters' interests, but have brought down a once prosperous country with a large, strong middle class to a nation beset with a shrinking and struggling middle-class and increased concentration of wealth and power at the top.

The first was that cutting taxes on the wealthy fostered economic growth and job creation. That was launched by President Reagan, but all he proved was that cutting taxes + tripling the deficit, about as Keynesian as one can be, may stimulate the economy. Indeed, it is arguable that the impact of low taxes on the wealthy alone is quite the opposite -- their idle wealth squirreled away (these days) in off-shore tax havens, extracted from the economy and not doing anything, was one of the causes Galbraith proposed for the Depression (The Great Crash, 1929).