Just As Every Cop Is

Just As Every Cop Is A Criminal - According to today's Strib, it's really the Democrats who are "fiscally responsible":

A group of prominent Democratic economists organized a conference call last week to blast the economic performance of President Bush. Nobel laureate Robert Solow of MIT pointed out that three federal tax cuts in three years have done little to stimulate the sluggish economy.

As of 1983, President Reagan's tax cuts hadn't yet gotten the economy going, either - should it have been tossed out? Oh, wait - the Strib wanted us to do exactly that.

Laura Tyson, who ran President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, observed that the government has traded structural budget surpluses for structural deficits since Bush took office.

Yawn war September 11 deflation of Clinton bubble zzzzzz

Berkeley professor George Akerlof, another Nobel laureate, called Bush's tax cuts the worst fiscal policy in 200 years.

Really?

Worse than Lyndon Johnson's simultaneous attempts to fight cold, hot and poverty wars?

This wasn't one of those mail-order Nobel prizes, was it?

One might dismiss this critique as predictable sniping from partisan players -- except that these leading liberals now represent the responsible wing of economic thought in the United States.

WHOAH!

Re-read that statement; it's a non-sequitur. I do dismiss the partisan-hack critique, and the only way the liberals are responsible is if you completely pervert the meaning of the word to a degree that'd make Orwell cry "implausible!"

In a scathing report on U.S. fiscal policy, the IMF warns that continued government borrowing could undercut world confidence in the U.S. dollar and that tax and budget gimmicks approved by Congress this year mean that "fiscal transparency appears to have weakened in recent years."

That's the sort of language the IMF usually reserves for basket-case economies such as Brazil or Mexico.

The IMF is dominated by people who never met a tax they didn't like.

Every major forecast -- by the White House, by the Congressional Budget Office, by private economists -- shows federal deficits persisting long after the economic recovery takes hold.

"Every Major Forecast" in 1985 showed the defict lasting indefinitely, as well.

Major forecasts don't get a lot of credit these days. Justifiably so.

After conferring with his top economists in Crawford, Texas, last week, the president told reporters that the mini-summit had produced no new plans for an economic stimulus program. Perhaps his advisers are confident that the economy is on its way to a robust recovery. Or perhaps they recognize that there's no money left in Washington to give away.

Or maybe they realized we, the taxpayers, have no more money to "give away" to the type of wastrels who pay attention to the the ravings of the IMF, Laura Tyson and Robert Solow.

Posted by Mitch at August 18, 2003 06:47 AM