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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (191960)	6/18/2012 11:34:02 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543802

That post made no sense to me. You are reaching. Bush cut the taxes saying the governrment should not have so much extra money. Keynes would have kept paying off the debt. Bush was giving the money back to the rich who paid it by his own words. Keynes would have kept paying the debt off. And no dem would have started the war in Iraq. <<<<<< Keynes would have kept the Clinton tax policies in place and continued paying down the debt. >>>> That's where you are wrong. First economic danger was Y2K, followed soon by 9-11. The government did keynes like stimuluses for both. Then there was the first Bush recession. Remember Krugman arguing in 2002 - 2003 that we needed a housing boom to stimulate the economy? ..........ALSO, if you remember we fought two wars during all this time and that is exactly a keynesian type stimulus. Sooooo it is hard to argue that at least through say 2004 that there was any option under Keynesian thinking to increase taxes. BUT in a way we did increase taxes because of the housing explosion. ESPECIALLY State and local coffers became flush with extra spending cash. AND that then led to overexpansion of local and State governments. The states for the most part didn't save as they had no incentive to so they just grew and became way bigger than normal times could possibly allow.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (191960)	6/18/2012 3:36:21 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 543802

AND that then led to overexpansion of local and State governments. The states for the most part didn't save as they had no incentive to so they just grew and became way bigger than normal times could possibly allow. I don't know about that. Looking at data from census.gov , total state/local government employment looks to have gone up at about the same rate as the population from 2000 to 2010. At first glance, payrolls seem to have outrun inflation, but I didn't do the proper compounding to really check. There was certainly some boondoggle spending post 9/11 but that doesn't seem to be reflected in employment figures. Historically, in the Reagan era anyway, I think the problem in boom times is not that government expands too much, but that politically, any budget surplus must be eliminated via tax cuts. It's sort of a requirement. Then in lean times, deficits require government cuts. There's a racketing effect. It's one of the more subtle components of the starve the beast philosophy that's been dominant since Reagan. In Keynesian terms, it's exactly backwards from what should be done to smooth out the business cycle, but the GOP is as hostile to Keynes as it is to everything else from the FDR era. With about as much rational basis. There must be some Randian deconstruction of Keynes somewhere.