The Daily Beast : "The Lies and Lunacy in Tim Pawlenty's Economic Plan" - The Idiocy of Pawlenty’s numbers shows just how far removed from economic reality this country is getting to be. The Republicans have lost any connection to earth, and the Democrats are afraid (with a few noble exceptions) to tell the American public the truth

.

Tim Pawlenty : Frontrunner in Economic Lies and Myths :

A candidate’s economic plan usually inspires discussion and selective disagreement. But as Michael Tomasky argues, Tim Pawlenty’s plan is pure nonsense.

The Daily Beast
The Lies and Lunacy in Tim Pawlenty's Economic Plan
by Michael Tomasky
June 8, 2011


The Lies and Lunacy in Tim Pawlenty's Economic Plan


Some excerpts :

Picking the biggest and most pernicious conservative lie of our times is about as enviable a job as naming the most undeserved bonus at AIG. The same goes for picking the biggest conservative liar—though Tim Pawlenty has now arguably made himself the frontrunner (for that title at least). In the economic plan he announced this week, Pawlenty took my choice for No. 1 lie as his starting point. And it got worse from there.

The lie, which one hears from Republicans on cable television on a daily basis, is that “we spent our way into this crisis.” Yes, federal spending has gone up significantly in the last decade. But increased spending wasn’t as decisive as decreased revenue. The truth can’t be said often enough: We did not spend our way into this crisis; we de-taxed our way into it. Very few people want to believe this. Even many liberals get nervous when this is brought up, because the mere word “taxes” makes some people jumpy. But it’s the truth: The Bush tax cuts have had more to do with our parlous fiscal situation than any Obama spending you can name.

We de-regulated our way into it, too—for the obvious reason that the repeal of Glass-Steagall and associated moves by Congress, the Bush Securities and Exchange Commission, and other regulators told the derivatives traders that no one was watching. That caused the economic meltdown in the first place.

But we exacerbated it with tax cuts. One measure: Take the question of publicly held debt as a percentage of GDP. Most economists consider anything under 60 percent more or less stable. Ours is in the mid-70s. But without the Bush tax cuts, according to two experts from the Center for American Progress, the ratio would be... just a hair under 60 percent. The debt situation would be manageable. (And by the way: In 2001, after the Clinton surplus, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that we could be debt-free by 2009.)

............................

For those who reside in the world of fact, it’s beyond question that the decrease in tax revenue because of the Bush tax cuts and the economic meltdown that resulted from conservative deregulatory policies has done more than spending to create the crisis. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world of fact. We live, instead, in a world of right-wing ideological lunacy. And so we get things like Tim Pawlenty’s jaw-dropping economic plan, which ignores completely our revenue reality.

.................

Second, the bilious idiocy of Pawlenty’s numbers shows just how far removed from economic reality this country is getting to be. The Republicans have lost any connection to earth, and the Democrats are afraid (with a few noble exceptions) to tell the American public the truth. In such a context, erstwhile conservative Republican Ben Bernanke emerges as a courageous truth-teller for saying something as simply and obviously true as that enacting sharp spending cuts now will hurt the economy. Time was when Republicans listened to the Fed chairman. But these days I guess he’s a socialist, too.

.