"Obama Steps on Message, GOP Steps on Economy" By Jonathan Chait at New York

[applegrove]

Obama Steps on Message, GOP Steps on Economy

By Jonathan Chait at New York

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/obama-steps-on-message-gop-steps-on-economy.html

"SNIP.......................................................


The upward-sloping red line is private sector employment, and the downward-sloping blue line is government employment. Obama’s jobs plan is to spend money building public infrastructure and rehiring laid-off state and local employees. Macroeconomic Advisers estimates that Obama’s plan would add more than a million jobs, a calculation that is broadly in line with other private sector estimates.


Republicans in Congress oppose Obama’s jobs plan and utterly deny the consensus beliefs of the macroeconomic industry. The Republican line is that, even in current conditions of mass unemployment, zero interest rates and low inflation, higher short-term deficits harm the economy rather than help it. Republicans embraced this unorthodox line of thinking suddenly, after maintaining the opposite when their party held the White House.


I used to reject the accusation that Republicans reversed their thinking out of a conscious decision to sabotage the economy in order to regain power. I tend to think of the human mind as more malleable than that, with people first grasping their self-interest and then persuading themselves to actually believe it, so that Republicans were walking around in the grips of a genuine fervor for obscure Austrian economic doctrines.


I was shaken of that belief not long ago, when Mitt Romney said off the cuff that cutting spending in his first year would retard the recovery. You would think at least some Republicans would raise a cry of outrage over their nominee’s casual dismissal of the bedrock assumptions that have driven Republican economic policy making for the last three years. Conservatives have not been shy of holding Romney’s feet to the fire in the case of ideological deviations such as appointing a transition director who hinted that having tens of millions of Americans without health insurance might be a bad thing. Conservatives mounted zero pushback whatsoever, suggesting that their newfound attachment to contractionary fiscal policy is a pure shift of expediency, to be discarded immediately if their party wins power and suddenly has an incentive to speed up rather than slow down the economy.


........................................................SNIP"

[Dawson Leery]

1. Why is it that Obama's attacks on an obstructionist GOP congress are "partisan".

Yet the GOP's attacks on everything Obama are not? Where does this bs come from.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. +1

IOKIYAR

[SoutherDem]

2. I think it is in the Republican DNA

They can't help the double standard. Sadly, the American people have allowed them to get away with it.