The Washington Post's Robinson is delusional
Utterly delusional.
The deficit-multiplying stimulus package the House just passed at President Obama's behest will be enough to inspire a great deal of saving and debt-paying. It will not do nearly as much to stimulate the economy as the media are so sure it will.
Tax cuts are more stimulating, in any case, than government spending. The liberal Ur-myth to the contrary, it was World War II, and not the spending programs of the New Deal, which brought us out of the Great Depression- as even FDR finally had to admit when he acknowledged the passing of our sick economy from the care of "Dr. New Deal" to that of "Dr. Win-the-War." The bill for any spending we do is going to come due some day. One cannot reconstruct the economy by endlessly spending money we do not have.
Yet even to the extent that government spending will help, the Obama package is inadequate to do more than enable our private financial prudence. It is simply not a solution to the economic crisis, and Robinson and others delude themselves when they insist that it is.
The solution- and I'm confident that we'll find one- will come from a bi-partisan effort calling upon the best minds of both parties, and neither. It will not be found in the fawning adherance to the Cult of the One which seems to have blinded so many Americans to the fact that we're a constitutional democracy in which the cult of personality has less place than the cult of common sense.
The deficit-multiplying stimulus package the House just passed at President Obama's behest will be enough to inspire a great deal of saving and debt-paying. It will not do nearly as much to stimulate the economy as the media are so sure it will.
Tax cuts are more stimulating, in any case, than government spending. The liberal Ur-myth to the contrary, it was World War II, and not the spending programs of the New Deal, which brought us out of the Great Depression- as even FDR finally had to admit when he acknowledged the passing of our sick economy from the care of "Dr. New Deal" to that of "Dr. Win-the-War." The bill for any spending we do is going to come due some day. One cannot reconstruct the economy by endlessly spending money we do not have.
Yet even to the extent that government spending will help, the Obama package is inadequate to do more than enable our private financial prudence. It is simply not a solution to the economic crisis, and Robinson and others delude themselves when they insist that it is.
The solution- and I'm confident that we'll find one- will come from a bi-partisan effort calling upon the best minds of both parties, and neither. It will not be found in the fawning adherance to the Cult of the One which seems to have blinded so many Americans to the fact that we're a constitutional democracy in which the cult of personality has less place than the cult of common sense.
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