| NYT summarizes GOP’s failed economic policy Bob_Neer | Tue, Jun 5, 2012 12:42 AM EST One of the most concise summaries of current Republican economic policies I have seen. It is always useful to be reminded of Scott Brown’s essential campaign objective: lower taxes for the rich, no matter what the costs to Massachusetts. Until the government does more to stoke demand and growth, including with job-creating aid to states and investments in energy and infrastructure, college graduates and everyone else will struggle. Republican politicians have blocked the needed policies, claiming that cutting the budget deficit is more important and that somehow — given enough deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — things will turn around. They haven’t, and they won’t. |
| "One does not want to be the _prima donna_ in the shoestore," (( fold here )) fibbed Paddy, "who makes the poor clerk get out one hundred and sixty-eight (173.29) pairs of haute sabotage before buzzing off without buying so much as a flip-flop, but, well, ¿Perhaps we might see at least a couple of alternative ‘summaries’ of "failed G.O.P. economic policy?" It might have been better, marketingwise, if the poor put-upon lad had left the box the company-recommended political footwear came out of in the back room. "Class of 2012" is marked on the side plainly, which arouses suspicion in some breasts that maybe--just ‘maybe’--the NYTC comrades did not suppose themselves to be briefly setting forth the Intellectual Bottom™ (Pat. Pend.) of America’s Otherparty. Advocatin’ "¡Just Say NO!" is scarcely a ‘policy’, which entails that quoting or paraphrasing the same should not be passed off on the hapless e-consumer as analysis. Friends of the working stiff may rebut that the product he flogged at us was not simply JSN, it was more like "¡Keep on sayin’ NO while you wait for the downtrickle." More exactly, "given enough deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, things will turn around." That is recognizably Otherpartisan, at least, though if that’s all the ‘summary’ one gets, an indignant demand to have one’s investment refunded would be only human. As it happens, a couple of shops down Market Street, Brighton, towards the Palace of Public Tubavision, a different tentacle of the Blue Beast is having a special on a product that really does more or less meet the specifications. At any rate, dear Kruggie’s Monday column met them tolerably well, so I presume, without examination, that a special edition for the prose-challenged must be O.K. too. Kruggie’s shoe-box was marked "This Republican Economy," labelling congruent with "summarizes GOP’s failed economic policy." A little too congruent, maybe, in that the Intellectual Botto™ or underlying conceit is that what policy there has actually been lately has been more Republicanine than ‘Democrat’: "slash spending and cut taxes, ... the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years[,] ... is already the economic policy of Republican dreams." To summarize things like that is polemic as well as mammonological: ¡the Otherparty perps certainly don’t think that they have been in control! And, like Comrade Blazer, Prof. Krugman might be reprehended for using the word ‘policy’ to refer to a vector sum that (one presumes) nobody specifically intended. Of the eight hundred and seventeen (817) words in Kruggie’s piece, not one (0.0) is ‘college’ or ‘university’ or anything synonymous, which seems about the right proportion to the present keyboard. Comrade Professor Doctor Blazer, Esq., of Columbia University in the City of New York would disagree. And that makes sense: to a hammer, we all look like nails; to a tertiary educationaliser, like seminar fodder. This perfessional deformation, as I account it, is harmless enough in itself, maybe even kinda cute, if you set up the lighting just so before you take the snapshot. To take for granted that throwing money at schools is the only sort of Keynesio-Stiglitzio-Krugmanite stimulus that calls for protracted discussion puts one in mind of The Eagle and the Wren. ’Tis not quite so charming, though, when the omphaloscopic Mme. Wren sets herself up to be specially emblematic of the Spirit of Massachusetts, for this province has long been in danger of making Tert. Ed. unto us wonderful what bananas were to Ancient Nicaragua. Should the crops ever fail simultaneously at H*rv*rd and Mass. General, I expect we’d be chewing at our boots in no time. Moreover, Mme. Wren has been so long and so well entrenched in her Faculty Club as to have lost all personal recollection of what that admittedly picturesque institution looks like from the outside. "¡Women and educationalisers first!" does not, I fear, make all that favorable an impression on mostvolks, and that without wandering as far into the virtual slums as The Boston Herald. The Columbia E-comrade, like Blue Blazerdom at large, is likely to find himself an extra in "Senator Coakley, the Sequel" if he cannot manage to snap out of his collective self-narcissism pretty quick and start taking "the costs to Massachusetts" somewhat more liberally than merely setbacks for medical and educational tourism. Alternatively, he might want to consider conversion to a frank and manly self-cynicism. This would entail consciously accepting the axiom that quacks and pædagogues and possibly a couple of ancillary professions [*], but nobody else, ought to be remunerated ever more and more above the general rate of inflation in sæcula sæculorum amen. This plan will be--or at least with a little rearrangement down in the servant quarters, could be--perfectly swell for the Commonwealth on a Hill, not quite so good for the rest of u... for the rest of them. Happy days. _____ [*] Should this spoofery ever fall into the paws of Mass. Republicanines, they would no doubt want baincappin’ ("the financial services industry") to be classified with medicine and educationism as a no-expense-barred zone. Equally without doubt, the Blue Blazers would be reluctant, to put it mildly, to grant such crass materialistic petitioners that for which they pray. At that juncture, it would be interesting to watch e-comrade ‘David’ do us one of his characteristic shysterly double-standardizations. Though he could scarcely appeal to the fact that baincappin’ can be done anywhere--for so can health care and "knowledge care"--he might make a little headway by pointing out that, as a matter of fact, der späte Bainkapitalismus already mostly *is* done out-of-commonwealth, Governor Romney and B. C. proper bein’ rather eccentrically sited. On the other hand, Paddy and Eye decided the other day that it would be nifty to establish a (very slightly) Greater Massachusetts in which the Athens of Suffolk County queens it over three major off-shore islands rather than two: Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Manhattan. (Just a suggestion) 
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