Paul Krugman: Eat The Future

[Stuart G]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Published: February 13, 2011


On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal for immediate cuts in federal spending. Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the Future.


I’ll explain in a minute. First, let’s talk about the dilemma the G.O.P. faces.

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense

The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget.

Pew also asked people how they would like to see states close their budget deficits. Do they favor cuts in either education or health care, the main expenses states face? No. Do they favor tax increases? No. The only deficit-reduction measure with significant support was cuts in public-employee pensions — and even there the public was evenly divided.

The moral is clear. Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

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1. This republican logic twisting and hypocricy...

..is only an issue if it's made an issue and the public knows about it. And the only way that happens is if we have rabid, partisan attack dogs both in terms of our elected Democratic officials and also their surrogates appearing on tv shows and writing editorials.

And we all know we don't have any of that. So yeah, it's great that the Republicans have twisted themselves into what would seemingly be untennable fits of logic and hypocricy and in a just world they would pay a political price for that. But the only way they will is if the other side has a good, strong body of enforcement to hold them accountable. And we don't. Not only don't we, and not only is our side NOT good at pointing this stuff out, the ones who do get air time and the ones who do speak up on the subject seem more concerned with being nice and not being to mean to their "friends across the aisle".

So yeah....would be great if what Krugman and other people are writing about was something that the other side was going to be held to account for. But they won't.