{"id":8545,"date":"2011-10-28T09:01:18","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T14:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=8545"},"modified":"2011-10-28T09:10:53","modified_gmt":"2011-10-28T14:10:53","slug":"republicans-rush-to-defend-keynesian-economic-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2011\/10\/28\/republicans-rush-to-defend-keynesian-economic-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Rush To Defend Keynesian Economic Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story\u00a0Republicans Cry Uncle On Spending \u2026 When Cuts Hit Home<\/strong><\/a> on Talking Points Memo<\/em> starts with the following paragraphs:<\/p>\n

It took months of fighting \u2014 the threat of a government shutdown, the graver threat of a default on the national debt, and now a new threat of major, automatic cuts to Medicare and defense programs \u2014 but Congress\u2019 deficit obsession has finally exposed the rarest of all species: Republican Keynesians.<\/p>\n

With just a under a month until the deficit Super Committee must recommend policies that cut the 10 year deficit by $1.2 trillion, members of the Republican party \u2014 the same party that\u2019s been on the war path for deep spending cuts, and that decries President Obama\u2019s \u201cfailed stimulus\u201d \u2014 are making uncharacteristic arguments against slashing spending. Trim too much, too quickly, they warn, and people will lose their jobs!<\/p>\n

Call them Defense Keynesians \u2014 GOP members who represent defense interests, veterans, service members, contractors, and others whose livelihoods would be impacted by deep cuts to defense spending. They don\u2019t want the Super Committee to cut much more, if any, from defense, and they certainly don\u2019t want to pull the so-called \u201ctrigger\u201d which would cut defense across the board by about $600 billion starting in 2013, if the panel gridlocks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They laughed at the flippant comment that John Maynard Keynes is reported to have made that if you couldn’t find anything better to spend stimulus money on, you could keep people employed by just having them dig holes and then fill them up again.\u00a0 What is it when you spend billions of dollars to employ people to build bombs and guns?\u00a0 Don’t they just dig holes?\u00a0 Then you hire people to repair what the others you hired blew up.<\/p>\n

There must be some better way to spend the money.\u00a0 What if you didn’t hire people to blow things up, but put those people to work fixing infrastructure?\u00a0 Also the people you used to have to hire to fix what was blown up could instead work on building new things.<\/p>\n

Instead of destroying future generations, you could\u00a0 keep the teachers employed teaching our next generation of innovators and builders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story\u00a0Republicans Cry Uncle On Spending \u2026 When Cuts Hit Home on Talking Points Memo starts with the following paragraphs: It took months of fighting \u2014 the threat of a government shutdown, the graver threat of a default on the national debt, and now a new threat of major, automatic cuts to Medicare and defense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8545"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8553,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545\/revisions\/8553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}