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Sometimes, I use articles and editorials (and even books) found elsewhere as launching pads for a discourse of my own, or as threads in a synthesis of some kind. But, this time, I just want to make sure that you read this editorial, by William G. Gale of The Brookings Institute: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073002671.html.

Whether Gale’s analysis is the definitive word on the subject, or whether there are legitimate counterarguments that belong in the mix, one thing is certain: The Tea Party-dominated far-right is blind and deaf to economic analysis, while simultaneously claiming to be the torch-bearers of “fiscal responsibility.” News Flash: There is no fiscal responsibility that is based on economic ignorance (as in to ignore). Choosing blind ideology over sound analyses applied to reliable data according to scientific methodology is the opposite of responsibility.

The none-too-liberal Denver Post reported today that “even conservative-leaning budget and policy analysts said the Republican blueprint, as drafted, would lead to bigger, not smaller, deficits and that it did not contain the concrete, politically difficult steps needed to alter the nation’s fiscal trajectory.” (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16159864).  You know you’re in trouble when your pseudo-economic mantra to shrink government, lower taxes, and reduce regulation is rejected even by that minority of professional economists who are ideologically inclined in your favor.

Alan Greenspan, no mamsy pamsy nanny statist by any stretch, had already publicly said that the continuation of the Bush tax cuts to the super-wealthy is counterproductive and economically indefensible at this juncture.  Not even Republican shills (at least those with an iota of integrity) can support the economically irresponsible, politically pandering and cynical attempt by the Republicans to wrest political power from those who, you know, are actually trying to govern the country.

Even by the narrow measure of short-and-medium-term economic efficiency and robustness, the Republican policy fails. Add in its complete indifference to long-term economic sustainability (by, for instance, mitigating global warming), distributional justice (by, for instance, ever-more insistently advocating policies which continue to concentrate ever-more wealth in ever fewer hands), and human welfare in general (by, for instance…, well, everything they stand for), and you have failure on an epic proportion, failure that will reduce our children and their children to suffering victims of a dumb ideology successfully imposed on a complacent and complicit society.

As I’ve said before on this blog (The Economic Debate We’re Not Having: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247), there are legitimate and necessary debates to be had over how much and what kind of public spending, under what conditions, serves our long-term interests, and how much and what kinds harm our long-term interests, all things considered. And certainly, one of the principal things to consider is the effect it has on the robustness of the economy. I’ve linked to an op-ed piece by a Harvard economist and public policy expert who argued, in a remarkably balanced and level-headed analysis, that there’s little or nothing government can do to stimulate job creation (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=325); to an academic paper by another professor of economics at our own University of Colorado who argued that those public investments in public goods that are supplementary to private goods have the largest (non-keynesian) multiplier (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247&cpage=1#comment-14); and to an op-ed piece by the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, who railed against Republican Mitch McConnell for resorting to political extortion to hold much-needed middle-class tax relief hostage to clearly fiscally irrational tax breaks for the super-wealthy (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=415).

I’ve argued myself that few argue that The Great Depression wasn’t definitively ended by the most robust, public debt-creating public spending project in human history: America’s participation in World War II, as the arsenal of the free world. I’ve yet to hear anyone explain how public spending can be so inefficacious, when it was so resoundingly effective in that case.

Be that as it may, that’s the kind of debate responsible leadership should be having, rather than this economically, socially, and politically destructive sloganeering, spreading false certainties like a plague through the land, such that sweet old grannies are now spewing them today just as some sweet old grannies spewed racist epithets in generations past.

Even the free-market advocate Economist magazine noted in this weeks issue that the Tea Party “constitutional idolatry” which is paraded out as the political philosophical justification for this mantra, is “infantile” (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=525). When the most highly respected market oriented magazine in the world calls the ideological underpinnings of a movement that claims to be the defenders of liberty “infantile,” in a chorus accompanied by conservative economic and policy analysts stating that the GOP plain actually increases rather than reduces our deficit, you know that reason is in decreasing supply at that end of the ideological spectrum.

It’s time to grow-up, folks; or move aside, and let the grown-ups do the serious business of governing ourselves wisely.

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