Declare Victory
In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash. (Paul Krugman, NYT, 12/29/2011)
Like those pesky New Year's resolutions that you just can't seem to keep, RedStateVT promises to stop writing about Paul Krugman and...well, you know the rest. In a column audaciously entitled: "Keynes Was Right" Krugman declares himself to be correct all along. The proof? The Obama stimulus did not work because it was not big enough. Come again? This argument strikes us akin to one of those "prove that you stopped beating your wife" riddles that you can't really prove. Maybe the stimulus didn't work because it was a pork-ladened pay-off to Democrat constituencies. Maybe it didn't work because those shovel-ready jobs weren't really shovel-ready as Obama himself chuckled about. Or maybe just, investors and businesses are sitting on the sidelines waiting for Obama to be gone.
And that austerity that Krugman decries? Well here's another view of it:
Amid this month's payroll tax fracas, few noticed that Congress passed a 1,200-page, $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2012. Maybe no one in Washington boasted because it's a victory for spending as usual. (WSJ, 12/31/2011)
Let's end the year on a positive note:
Although they have become prone to apocalyptic forebodings about the fragility of the nation’s institutions and traditions under the current president, conservatives should stride confidently into 2012. This is not because they are certain, or even likely, to defeat President Obama this year. Rather, it is because, if they emancipate themselves from their unconservative fixation on the presidency, they will see events unfolding in their favor. And when Congress is controlled by one party, as it might be a year from now, it can stymie an overreaching executive. (George Will, Washington Post, 12/30/2011)
How any Liberal could read a George Will column and not have a "Road to Damascus" conversion is unfathomable to RedStateVT!
You ignored Krugman's point that 2/3's of the stimulus was tax cuts to appease Republicans and Conservative Democrats. Of course, you could counter that there were not enough shovel ready projects for the 1/3 that was devoted to them so more $ there would not have worked. Perhaps they should have used the money to buy empty houses and knock them down. Then they could have resold the land to farmers and returned it to agriculture.
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