Friday links! Going out of business edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

An American patriot finally has the common sense to demand no more taxes and no more debt.

I don’t want to alarm you, but this is probably going to be the last weekend in America. Congress has until Tuesday to raise the debt ceiling, and to paraphrase the Magic 8-Ball, outlook not good. It is possible that ours will become the first generation in history to cause a US federal default, not by calamity or foreign depredation but by our respective insistences that we are right about everything. The Republican Party, having thus far produced a proposal guaranteed not to win any Democratic votes, has doubled down on partisanship by adding a balanced budget amendment. Harry Reid has announced that such a bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, even as he reminds us how important it is to pass something. With default 96 hours away, each party is working tirelessly to assure the American people that disaster is the other party’s fault. Being an American citizen on July 29, 2011 is like riding in the back seat of a car driven by a bickering couple, one of whom refuses to open his eyes and the other of whom won’t give directions.

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The last days of Starve the Beast

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments

I heard he bought up 71% of the country's limos.

 

One of my particular favorite terrified theories about the Republican party is Starve the Beast, the fiscal/political strategy developed by small-government thinkers in the late 1970s. Depending on whom you ask, Starve the Beast is either a widely accepted conservative tactic or a paranoid fantasy of the left, although if the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that those two categories can overlap. The idea behind S the B is simple: cutting social welfare and other spending programs is not popular, but cutting taxes is. Ergo, the best way to reduce the size of the federal government is to steadily reduce taxes, until the political pressure created by mounting deficits forces cuts in spending. It sounds kind of evil and crazy when I put it that way, as if the GOP were deliberately bankrupting the federal government in order to get the budget cuts it couldn’t secure by democratic means. Maybe it would be better to let someone more respected explain it, like 1978 Alan Greenspan:

Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.

Oh, wait. That sounds evil and crazy, too.

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