Alan Blinder - no doubt a socialist, communist Muslim - who is an Econ professor at Princeton (with Krugman, so there!), former member of the Fed Board and author of one of the most popular Econ textbooks as something to say:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576392023187860688.html
Basically, he takes on the Republican "idea" that government spending kills jobs. To be fair, it's an idea so patently absurd that a high school Econ student should be able to refute it, but still, zombie ideas must be decapitated. Whether with a baseball bat or an RPG, they must be put down.
More broadly, this speaks to the GOP's blind obeisance to ideas that are simply fanciful. And while there is a lot to be said about the complete falsity of, say, Neo-conservative foreign policy, the economics of the GOP are just baldly, fundamentally wrong.
You take any of the basic tenets of GOP economics and subject them to a reality test, and they fail.
Take cuts for the wealthiest produce jobs. No, they don't. They put more money into investors' hands, true. And in a sane equities market, that additional investment capital would be used to fund the next Apple or Google or whatever. But in the brave new world of Wall Street, all of this investment capital is used to create bubbles and chase after short term gains.
Government spending kills jobs. You really should just read Blinder's piece to see how absurd that idea is.
Any rise in taxes will kill growth and jobs. Taxes can be so high that they stifle growth. We are so far from that level that it's laughable. When Clinton and the Democrats raised taxes in '93, the GOP came out and talked about how the American economy was doomed. What followed was the longest post-war peacetime economic expansion in history and budget surpluses to boot.
This isn't - or shouldn't - be a big mystery. Grover Norquist, the great tax cut mandarin of the GOP, demands fealty to his flat earth, flat tax ideology. Cross him and you're done as a GOP politician. And he has openly said that his preference is to shrink government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.
That is the goal of the modern GOP: a return to the Gilded Age era of laissez faire economics. They are pretty close, as wealth inequality has exploded since the Age or Reagan began. But the social safety net created by people like FDR, LBJ and, wait for it, Richard Nixon has managed to put a floor under most American's economic hardship. Not all, as homeless shelters are overflowing and people go hungry here in America every night. But if we had a modern day Jacob Riis cataloguing how the other half lives, it would not be near so dire.
So the GOP has succeeded in creating the economic inequality of the Gilded Age, and now they are setting their sights on the welfare state. Not the "welfare" state of "t-bones for big black bucks" but the welfare state of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, food stamps, public schools, public works projects and any and all regulation.
This manifests itself not only in what the troika of Walker, Snyder and Kasich are doing in the Midwest, but also in Shelby's killing Peter Diamond's nomination to the Fed or holding the debt ceiling hostage.
As Blinder notes in his opening, ideas shape the world. And one of the two major parties has adopted a set of ideas that could destroy this country. First by defaulting on the debt and then by destroying whatever protections Americans have against the machinations and mastications of mercenary capitalism.
God help us if they win power in 2012. I really mean that.
UPDATE: Tom Levenson does a much better job on this theme than I did.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/06/21/in-the-integer-based-community/#more-72905
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