The American Conservative
My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong.
Revenge of the Reality-Based Community
Bruce Bartlett
This is a "confessional" setting forth how Bruce Bartlett came to the unsettling (for him) conclusion that Keynes was right after all. Its the demand, stupid.
Ripe for MMT?
4 comments:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/26/big-business-corrupted-economics
Along the same lines, Rachel Lomax asking "where is the revolutionary thinking" It really is a bubble
How long did it take? The time constant of this and similar OODA loops is not survivable for the USA.
Houston, we have a bigger problem. It's called obsolete thinkers.
Getting to the right platform doesn't matter if the train left the station 80 years ago. The foregon Output is beyond a travesty. It may not be survivable.
This is a bit rambling Tom and I'm having a hard time making sense of it...
He still seems a bit confused.
In the beginning he depicts himself taking shots at Bush/Cheney for "expanding govt" but then he seems to try to admit that this view was wrong but never goes back to say that Bush/Cheney had it right to the extent that he had it wrong... ????
After the early tax cuts (which Warren takes credit for via Andy Card) Bush/Cheney let the deficit fall while the private sector balance was large and expanding (housing/auto credit) and there was a large increase in expenditures from DoD on the GWOT and standing up DHS...
Then in 2008 when the deficit started to increase (indicative of cyclical weakness) they did a BOTTOM UP tax rebate of $650 for all taxpayers with household incomes LESS THAN $120k and implied there would be more if necessary... seems like right out of the MMT playbook.
Bartlett MISSES this entirely.
He seems to want to depict this as some sort of economic policy chaos that ruined the GOP but imo it has less to do with economic policy.
The GOP has been infiltrated by neo-confederate, anarcho-libertarian, homophobes and these deranged dominate the GOP messaging and this CANNOT get a plurality in a national election.
Bush would NEVER have made comments like Romney's 47% comments whether he thought a recorder was on or not.
And he would never have picked the Randian Ryan as his VEEP.
Cheney told Walker to go fuck himself...
You (thankfully) CANNOT win a national election in the US running on "Ayn Rand".... Bush used the phrases "compassionate conservative", "no child left behind" , etc.. these are "winning" messages that you can get swing voters with...
Rove went "tell them what they want to hear" with the Kochs this cycle and the Kochs wasted a lot of money but Rove probably is now set for life...
"W" has perhaps been tutoring his little brother Jeb...
Bartlett still has a ways to go imo...
rsp,
Bartlett may not be there yet, but he has come a long way and I give him a lot of credit for saying so.
Political ideology is a lot like religious belief and both only change rarely. Moreover, in the religions there is a big difference between the "fallen away" and apostates. Religious reserve a special place in hell for apostasy.
So Bartlett's "confessional" had to be a big deal for him. He has staked his life on the GOP agenda and that has slipped away from him. IN fact, he is now regarded as an "enemy of the faith."
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