It's one thing for progressive economists and activists to see the emptiness and complete foolishness of Tim Pawlenty's "economic plan". It's another thing for perhaps the globe's leading financial newspaper to dismiss it as something that is "difficult to describe without seeming to parody it." But, The Financial Times Clive Crook makes a valiant effort.
To be clear, Crook is a leading voice in the paper pushing the phony deficit and debt crisis. But, even in his world, Pawlenty is a joke. In a column in today's paper called "America prefers fiscal idiocy to intelligent choices", he says of Pawlenty:
Tim Pawlenty, seen as one of the more serious candidates for the Republican nomination – meaning somebody capable of discussing policy – set out an economic plan, as he called it, that was stunning in its vapidity. The plan is difficult to describe without seeming to parody it. I will do my best.
What the US most needs, Mr Pawlenty said, is a target for economic growth. Up to now, you see, lack of ambition has been the problem. Let this target be, oh, 5 per cent a year. Now see what growth of 5 per cent a year for 10 years – yes, 10 years – would do. The deficits just melt away. And there would be millions of new jobs.
This solves the fiscal problem and puts the economy back to work, but one cannot stop there. The size of government, a problem in its own right, would still need to be reduced. Therefore, let there be a constitutional amendment to cap public spending at 18 per cent of gross domestic product – six percentage points of GDP below its current level, and well below the average of recent decades. That way, demographic pressures on Social Security and Medicare would be unconstitutional, and hence contained.
This reduces the pressure on taxes, so Mr Pawlenty can take the Republican refusal to countenance increases of any kind and square it. Rates of income tax will come down; personal tax exemptions will remain (no need to widen the tax base); and taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest will be abolished altogether. It all adds up because the economy will growing at 5 per cent a year.
One hopes that Mr Pawlenty, in proposing this idiotic farrago, is making a cynical tactical calculation: win over the Tea Party activists by outflanking everyone on the right – difficult as that may be – then come back to the centre once the nomination is won. But having put down markers such as these, travelling all the way back to the land of the sane may be impossible. In any event, if you hoped that the presidential contest might raise the quality of discussion about US fiscal options, read Mr Pawlenty’s speech and weep.[emphasis]
Never mind that Pawlenty's plan, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, would be a gift for the 400 richest people in America, cutting their personal income taxes by 73 percent, and hand taxpayers with "incomes in excess of $1 million an average cut in personal income taxes of $288,800, a 41percent cut."
In the global elite world, it's just as bad. Crook calls Pawlenty and his plan a fraud, vapid, an idiotic farrago...
At least there seems to be broad class agreement on something.