How Republicans Sabotaged the Recovery

[Lucy Goosey]

How Republicans Sabotaged the Recovery
The economy didn't jump. It was pushed.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/23/how_republicans_sabotaged_the_recovery?page=0,0

Imagine, for a moment, how difficult it would have been to land a man on the moon if half of the U.S. Congress had believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Or consider how the War in the Pacific might have progressed if half of Congress had still thought the world was flat. Or whether polio would have been eradicated if half of Congress insisted that the best cure was bleeding using leeches. Unfortunately, this was the situation the United States in January 2009, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency. The nation was trying to climb out of the deepest economic hole since the Great Depression, but the Republican Party had about as scientific an approach to the economy as medieval alchemists did to the periodic table.

As they girded for each fight against a president they were determined to defeat, the Republicans fell back on the basic tenets of their economic philosophy. Unfortunately for the American people, those tenets were myths. Each one of the economic concepts that the Republicans held dear simply wasn't true, as qualified economists from around the political spectrum agreed.

The time is running out to repudiate these myths. The unemployment rate is still at 8.2 percent, and the nation added a scant 80,000 jobs in June. Meanwhile, 49 percent of Americans polled this month by the New York Times and CBS said that they thought Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, would do a better job with the economy as president, compared to 41 percent for Obama. If Romney were to follow Republican orthodoxy, however, his economic policy would be dangerously reliant on these five myths:

Myth 1: Government spending doesn't help the economy to grow in the short term.
Myth 2: Cutting tax rates eventually leads to higher tax revenue.
Myth 3: Government spending doesn't help the economy to grow in the long term.
Myth 4: Smaller government is always better.
Myth 5: The economy is meritocratic, so people earn what they deserve based on talent and effort.

This article is fairly long - the author expands on and explains each of the myths listed in the excerpt - but well worth a read, if you're interested in a rational, evidence-based account of how bad Republicans are for the economy.

I particularly love that the addressed the "people earn what they deserve based on talent and effort" myth.