Tag: Recession

Trump’s Stupid, Destructive Ideas Have Staying Power

Buck Banks

“There are lots of reasons to worry about how President Trump would handle a recession, should we tip into one. There’s his incompetent economic team. Or the limited fiscal policy tools at his disposal, given that Republicans already spent nearly $2 trillion on tax cuts. Or his efforts to discredit the Federal Reserve just when we’ll need it most. … One underrated concern: Trump’s tendency to double down on stupid and destructive ideas, despite — perhaps because of? — overwhelming evidence of their stupidity and destructiveness.”

— Catherine Rampell

This Week Marks 10 Years Under the Bush Tax Cuts

Trish
BushTaxCuts
Please, somebody grab that pen! (June 7, 2001)

In addition to being the day that the word “weiner” stopped being naughty and started being tiresome, June 7 was another milestone. According to self-proclaimed “Corporate Person American” William Rice, it deserves commemoration as the 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts.

Rice: ‘The Bush tax cuts created the deficit now being cited as a reason to pretty much scrap Medicare and once again make a college education a pleasant, impossible dream among the lower classes’

It was on June 7, 2001, that President Bush signed into law the high-end tax cuts that added $2.6 trillion to the national debt. It was these tax cuts, along with two wars and a recession, that created the deficit now being cited as a reason to pretty much scrap Medicare and once again make a college education a pleasant, impossible dream among the lower classes.

Rice’s modest proposal says that government is for pansies, unless you’re a corporation and in that case, government is here for you.

We expect the government to continue providing certain vital services, of course, such as huge, no-bid defense contracts; and 24-hour, drive-through patent courts for us to fight over the profits of questionably-useful and semi-dangerous but very well-promoted new drugs. But all the peripheral activities of government — such as ensuring adequate childhood nutrition and repairing drawbridges — merely create a strain on the natural ecosystem of corporations and Corporate-Person Americans.

If Republicans continue to run the economy into the ground by refusing to look at the revenue side of the budget equation, Obama will have to borrow Pres. Reagan’s line when he ran for re-election in 1984, but with a slight adjustment: Are you better off now than you were ten years ago?

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Verbatim

Trish

…one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming. Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality…Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman…asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.” My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too?

— Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist