Someone needs to declare Paul Krugman a national treasure because there are few who can so neatly skewer the madness of GOP economics as well in a 1,500 word column.
For tomorrow's NY Times he writes Downhill With the G.O.P, summarizing the GOP "Pledge to America" thusly.
Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.”
Noting that the Pledge condemns budget deficits 16 different times, he then explains that its only substantive proposal, making the Bush tax cuts permanent, ..."would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals. "
The Pledge proposes to cut spending, but offers only one concrete proposal, cancel the rest of the TARP program, and then continues, in a manner so familiar to readers of past GOP Pacts, Compacts, Pledge, and similar high-sounding documents, to provide virtually no concrete steps to actually deal with those awful deficits. (Remember their famous alternate Federal budget plan.....with no numbers in it?)
Everything else must be cut the Pledge says, although there are some areas the GOP feels can be saved......" common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” And that translates, Krugman notes, to mean that Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits. And there is the rub.
Krugman cites the findings of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center which state that:
....the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government
Yup, all of it. Everything from homeland security to national parks, the National Institutes of Health, small business loans, export subsidies, child health and nutrition programs and even (gasp) Congress.
And yet, Krugman notes, if somehow the GOP, or what claims to be the GOP were to somehow gain enough power to make the changes it wants, (which he finds very unlikely) their immediate goal would clearly be to wipe out both Social Security and Medicare...two of the three areas their Pledge claims are off limits.
The consequences, he asserts, would be America's transformation to a Banana Republic.
There are days I worry that we've already got the bananas.....it is the growing number of tarantulas that constitute the biggest threat.