When the Tea Party tones it down, it's still mistaken.

[alexpshenichkin]

This BBC profile of a handful of "Tea Partiers" manages to make them all sound fairly reasonable. Which is what makes it a useful look at why the movement is fundamentally misguided.

"I don't think it makes sense to spend our way out of recession. And the trillions we have spent haven't helped - unemployment is still high and small businesses are

Comments

[mumbly_joe]

Also, economics rant for a second:

If you don't think you can spend your way out of a recession, than you shouldn't think tax cuts work, either. Either way, you're doing deficit spending. The actual real-life debate between economists is whether fiscal tools work at all. I happen to think that monetarists, who argue that they don't and might even be counterproductive, are deeply misguided and have been proven wrong by history time and again, but that's a side-issue: the main point is, if spending doesn't work, tax cuts definitely don't work, and if tax cuts work, then spending works at least as well. Both of the above positions are logically consistent, because they are couched in the same economic theory.

The notion that government spending doesn't do anything, but tax cuts do, is idiocy propagated by Reaganites and inherently logically-inconsistent and I can't tell you how fucking sick I am of seeing people say things like this.

[mumbly_joe]

A related rant of mine is about people who say "The New Deal didn't end the Depression, the War did". Not in the sense that I necessarily disagree (lack of political will made the New Deal tragically half-assed, not unlike the ARRA), but rather in the sense that they seem to be claiming that our mobilized economy was a laissez-faire system of tax cuts and economic deregulation, rather than, you know, a quasi-command program of government capital investment, paid for with deficit spending ("war bonds" simply being propagandistic government bonds, after all).

[ultranurd]

I saw some crazy linked via Andrew Sullivan that amounted to a proposal that our best way out of the recession is war with Iran: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102907404.html

[mumbly_joe]

Yeah, I saw that, it was kind of amazingly terrible. Even worse than the violence he does to economics with the "war is magical and cures recessions, unlike other types of spending" meme is the fact that he is, in fact, promoting one of the mostly nakedly imperial notions I've ever seen in print: we should wage aggressive war against a country, because it will make us richer.

[alexpshenichkin]

It wouldn't be a David Broder article without a big ol' paragraph about how a giant ridiculous idiot-war with Iran would be bipartisan, and therefore the right decision.