Willard Romney's Accidental Truth Slips Out
May 25 Charles Pierce in Esquire
Chris Hayes caught this first, and he was chatting it up with kindly Doc Maddow last night, but, as near as I can tell, it has otherwise dropped down the holiday news well, never to be seen again. During Mark Halperin's extended Tiger Beat session with Willard Romney, the following exchange took place:
Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you're elected - why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you'd like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course.
Now, as it readily admits, the blog's knowledge of economics is limited to the blog's first law of economics - Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money - and it also believes that most professional economists arrive at their conclusions by reading the entrails of doves and cutting up goats on a rock, so it may be wrong here, but didn't Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression? No Christmas cards from the Ryan household this year, Willard.
That this remarkable moment sailed over Halperin's head and lodged in the wall behind him goes without saying.
Chris Hayes caught this first, and he was chatting it up with kindly Doc Maddow last night, but, as near as I can tell, it has otherwise dropped down the holiday news well, never to be seen again. During Mark Halperin's extended Tiger Beat session with Willard Romney, the following exchange took place:
Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you're elected - why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you'd like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course.
Now, as it readily admits, the blog's knowledge of economics is limited to the blog's first law of economics - Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money - and it also believes that most professional economists arrive at their conclusions by reading the entrails of doves and cutting up goats on a rock, so it may be wrong here, but didn't Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression? No Christmas cards from the Ryan household this year, Willard.
That this remarkable moment sailed over Halperin's head and lodged in the wall behind him goes without saying.