Paul Krugman wrote this piece in The New York Times yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In fact I wrote a very similar entry back in October called Regan’s Revenge. Amazing, considering that the GOP is allegedly the party of fiscal responsibility.
Paul Krugman wrote this piece in The New York Times yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In fact I wrote a very similar entry back in October called Regan’s Revenge. Amazing, considering that the GOP is allegedly the party of fiscal responsibility.
So the appropriate solution for Bush’s irresponsible spending is to quadruple it?
The current crisis is not due to government overspending. The currently problem is due to private overspending — spending that should never have been possible, but was, thanks mainly to Reagan’s deregulatory administration.
As for the current government spending, I have mixed feelings. The bail-out money questionable, and seems to me a bit like the Iraq war — a colossal grab of taxpayer money. The difference is that this time the thief is corporate America instead of the defense industry.
But money spent on education, health-care, and infrastructure is long overdue. Each of these things has been neglected for decades and each is fundamentally important to the success of the country.
Addressing these problems is going to be expensive, but it seems even more so if you’re convinced that the previous spending levels were satisfactory. They were not. If they had been, it wouldn’t be necessary to impose sharp increases now.
Another nice piece from nytimes, this one by David Brooks, who leans quite a bit more to the right than Krugman. He correctly points out that — whatever happens — there’s no going back to the way things were.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/opinion/12brooks.html?ref=opinion