Krugman's "crazy 36"
I presume — I haven’t checked the roll call — that the 36 Senators who voted against cloture on the stimulus were the same 36 Senators who voted for the DeMint amendment, which would have replaced $800 billion of stimulus with $3.1 trillion of non-stimulative tax cuts. These, by the way, are the same people now accusing Obama of engaging in “generational theft.”
Anyway, this is the starting point for any analysis of the Senate from now on: 36 Senators — 87.8% of the Republican delegation — are irresponsible hypocrites.
How can the proper societal response to the loss of 600,000 jobs/month be tax cuts for the highest-income Americans who are lucky enough to still have jobs (and massive bank bailouts)???
Tax cuts provide only a small fraction of the stimulus bang-per-buck as government spending because: 1) unemployed people have a high propensity to spend their income whereas high-income, wealthy people save much of any extra dollar they receive in tax cuts; and, 2) tax cuts are spent on foreign goods as well as domestic whereas 99% of government stimulus spending is recycled into our economy. Furthermore, government spending on education, transportation and communication infrastructure, etc. lifts the nation’s economic potential, thus increasing our ability to pay bills in the future… the exact opposite effect of tax cuts.
These “representatives” of the people are either economic morons or unabashed protectors of only the wealthiest Americans.
Posted by James on Wednesday, February 11, 2009