Since President Biden took office, the comparisons have not been so much to his predecessor.
While the country faces a severe case of whiplash as it moves from Trump to the calmer and more collected Biden, many observers are focusing on a finer distinction: between Biden and President Obama.
Iâm still here!
Cap Gains tax increases, transaction taxes on the bots, and increased corporate taxation welcome.
Are The Austerity Alarmists Gone For Good?
Never.
Yes, youâre still here.
If only the alarmists were proposing what youâre proposing!
âDeficits donât matterâ was coined by a Republican.
Nuff said.
When youâve run up over $8 Trillion in debt in 4 years, itâs a little hard to pivot. Not to mention the annual budget deficit tripled under Reagan/Bush I compared to Carter, then Clinton balanced the budget. Then Bush II left a trillion dollar deficit, which Obama brought down to around $300 Billion. Then the King of Debt went hog wild.
If there were any doubt that Republicans donât care about debt, they just want to punish the American people for putting a Democrat in office, this last go around on ARP put that to rest.
Or as I tell my Republican friends, âThe sore losers are back! Time to punish the country for voting against you.â
THey are just saving themselves for the next campaign and Iâm SURE weâll be hearing about the âtax and spendâ Democrats. The problem for the Republicans is they havenât done jack sht about anything in this country for so long so they canât easily pile onâŚwe need roads and bridges and buildings and they will run to the microphones to take credit when things are builtâŚpretending THEY brought them to the state(s).
And the balanced budget amendment!
The âausterity alarmistsâ who matter, I suspect, are Dsâe.g., the Larry Summers of the world, who have the ear, I fear, of the Joe Manchins and Kristen Sinemas of the world. Also, the Post and the Times have both been front-paging a series of inflation-is-going-to-kill-us-all pieces. I doubt austerity is dead yet. Happy to be wrong.
Not if my neighbor is any kind of bellwetherâŚ
No.
Short answers to easy questions.
Bad faith actors aside â mostly Republican of course â a more detailed and nuanced take on the debate could be characterized, not as deficit hawks vs doves, but as Larryâs vs. Jeromes; https://slate.com/business/2021/03/larry-summers-jerome-powell-economy-overheat.html
tl/dr; ââŚitâs not just about whether we might experience some inflation. Summersâ position, echoed by Mankiw, is that we really canât trust the Fed to deal with inflation without grinding the economy into a recession.â https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/status/1376863695188471809?s=20
They are like Punxsutawney Phil they see their shadow only when Democrats are in power.
the predictions of the austerity alarmists â inflation, rising interest rates, a collapse in bond marketing financing â did not come true. Meanwhile, Republican politicians who stoked the concerns passed a massive tax cut once in power, revealing the extent of the bad faith made in peddling those claims
Biden and the Democrats are obviously misreading the data. The fears of the austerity alarmists were legitimate. The massive tax cuts were the only thing that saved the country from a catastrophic economic collapse.
It cannot be overstated how drastically the Trump years and the pandemic have changed the game. Trumpâs drunken spending and promises of massive infrastructure programs primed much of the GOP base to stop caring about spending and focus almost exclusively on culture wars. Thatâs what they want now, 24/7 culture wars. Austerity alarmism is boring and no longer has the appeal that it once did. The GOP can thank Trump for that.
Has anybody looked at the size of the total economy anytime lately. I looked at BlackRock, Inc. the other day. It is an American multinational investment management corporation with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021. Granted they are the worldâs largest investment management company, but that is just one company.
We never put these deficits in perspective. The big bill coming up is the infrastructure bill, in excess of 3 trillion dollars. If we donât invest in updated infrastructure we are going to decline out of the first world. If we do the improvements will boost the economy many, many times. Who are we going to pay that 3 trillion to anyway. Ourselves. The alternative is to sit on our asses and do nothing. That gets us nowhere. If we arenât building, we are dying.
All good ideas. Iâd like to see all capital gains taxed as income, with strongly progressive taxation rates. The transaction tax might even be more important to get through first, though.
Thereâs still Larry Summers.
We are way overdue for infrastructure maintenance. Power, transportation and water for starters are critical needs that will return the investment many times over. I hope someone in the Biden Administration comes up with a quantum breakthrough like Eisenhower did with the interstate highway system. The time is ripe. Opporknockety Tunes.
âLet me write $1,000,000,000.00 in hot checks and I too could give you an illusion of prosperityâ, Lloyd Benson 1988.
Paul Krugman has written several articles on this topic and the real concern is will the âboth sides nowâ media take Republican hypocrisy seriously.
With the above in mind, it needs to be remembered that every Republican since and to include Reagan has used big increases in deficit Government spending to stimulate the economy to hide the fact that âSupply Sideâ or trickle down economics does not work and results in recessions.
Republicans when not in power with help from the media turn to being deficit hawks the instant a Democrat becomes president. This has been happening for over 40 years when Reagan ran against the deficit and when elected turned America, which until his term was the largest creditor nation on the planet, into the biggest debtor nation on the planet. This pattern was repeated by George W Bush who inherited from Bill Clinton the largest surplus in human history and turned it into the biggest deficit in human history. And, has been discussed, Donald Trumpâs tax shift from billionaires to the well off (remember Donald Trumpâs tax act raised taxes by over $5,000 or more a year on over twice as many people who saw their taxes reduced by over $5,000 a year) included a huge deficit increase supported by every elected Republican.
The only reason Republicans have gotten away with this hypocrisy of deficit spending is because of the media. Paul Ryan in particular was proclaimed by the media as a serous wonk on deficit reduction consistently proposed plans that well gutting Government programs for the poor supported spending and tax policies that exploded the deficit.
So if there is a difference between Biden and Obama on austerity and deficits much of that difference is due to the mediaâs approach to over 40 years of Republican hypocrisy of increasing deficits well in power to demanding austerity when not in power.
