WaPo Runs Review of Way-Out-Of-Paradigm Book

Charles Lane reviews Eugene Steuerle's new completely out of paradigm, deficit terrorism book. Lane is not stupid, he should know better than to write this garbage:

"This near-total loss of “fiscal freedom” is the theme of “Dead Men Ruling,” a short, superb new book by C. Eugene Steuerle, from which the above statistics derive; the title nicely expresses the fact that today’s lawmakers are tightly constrained by the accumulated, and seemingly unalterable, decisions of their predecessors. Government is not just out of their control; it’s beyond their control. 

Steuerle persuasively argues that the nation’s budget challenge is not simply a matter of deficits and debt, important as they are. 

Rather, the point is to restore a long-term balance between spending and revenue so that the federal government can invest in new priorities without further indebting an already dangerously indebted country. 

 Steuerle’s book is an effective riposte to those who would argue that fiscal concerns are overblown in light of recent progress against the deficit or that “deficit hawks” are just rationalizing mean-spirited “austerity” to punish the poor and elderly.
To the contrary, what Steuerle shows is that the issue is long-term fiscal sustainability, which would provide flexibility.  

A government that lives within its means would be freer to stimulate the economy during recessions or to devote more resources to the needs of poor children — as opposed to maintaining the current consumption of older middle- and upper-middle-class voters, which is the unstated but actual purpose of the status quo."

Blah, blah, blah. Complete garbage. I know WaPo doesn't exactly have the highest standards for economics reporting (H/T Dean Baker!), but this is just pathetic.  I often seriously wonder how some men can go through their entire careers working in fiscal policy and still be so damn ignorant. It is a lack of intellectual curiosity, capacity, or mixture of both? Unfortunately, all we can be sure of is it will be the poor and vulnerable, not the pundits, that will pay for this ignorance.

Limbaugh Transcript: Observations on Fiscal Morons in Action

Transcript from Limbaugh last week on the emerging federal legislation to maintain lower interest rates on student loan debt at this link. (Please ignore all the ads for "investing" in Precious Metals that may appear on his site... if you go there.)

He's (Pres. Obama) gonna veto this so that student loan rates will go up so that he can blame Republicans for it. He is counting on the fact that the media will not significantly report the Republicans tried to stop it. Pelosi is attacking the Republican bill. This is what they're saying. Because this is paygo. "Okay, how we gonna pay for this? The student loan interest rate." The government runs it now. The higher interest rate goes the more the government gets. So if you're not gonna have the student loan rate doubled, then the government says, "Uh-oh, we're losing money here." So Boehner and the boys, to make up the loss, take $5.8 billion from Obamacare, and Pelosi is attacking Boehner's bill because it uses that $5.8 billion from Obamacare's preventative health program. She's calling it an attack on the health of American women. Apparently only American women benefit from preventative health care. Now, never mind that Democrats voted earlier this year to take money from the preventative health fund to help pay to keep doctors' Medicare reimbursements from dropping. And never mind that Obama's own budget proposed cutting $4 billion from the same fund to pay for some of the other stuff they wanted. The GOP has always been against the interest rate on student loans going up. They just want to pay for it. Again, folks, just so everybody's clear, the student loan interest rate is scheduled to double because of legislation the Democrats wrote in 2007. And since the government runs the student loan program, all the interest payments go to the government now, not private sector banks. So, if the student loan interest rate's scheduled to double, then the government's telling itself it's gonna have that much more money coming in as people pay off their loans and pay the new interest rate. So the Republicans come along and say, "We're gonna make sure the interest rate doesn't go up." Well, that means the government's gonna lose all that money.

You can see here how the absolute ignorance of our morons in government, who have signed on to some sort of "pay-go" idiocy due to their mistaken beliefs in what the fiscal authorities of the Federal government represent,  handcuffs them from being able to pass any legislation that would create needed net financial assets in the non-govt sector at this point.

Here they feel that they must trade off preventative health care services for less revenues from student loan interest, when in fact the government doesn't need to charge ANY interest on student loan debt in the first place and non-govt sector direct healthcare providers continue to be revenue constrained.

Limbaugh is good at pointing out this idiocy, but he too has NO CLUE what it is REALLY all about:  Both sides are mired in absolute economic and fiscal ignorance which has them surrendering the only true authority that they have all worked so hard to obtain positions within.