Ezra Klein finds it odd that the Republicans are both opposing a tax cut for the middle class and pushing permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. Krugman replies that it’s not odd at all because the Republicans don’t really care about deficits:
All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.
The entire debate has been fake. If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.
He’s right, of course. But that doesn’t get to the heart of what Ezra was talking about. This has nothing to do with deficits, even in the fake sense. It’s about an economic philosophy that says the wealthy are the “jaaahb creators” and everyone else are are parasites, moochers and looters. To listen to Michele Bachmann and Eric Erickson, who speak for many Republicans, our fiscal problems are caused by the 47% of Americans who don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes.
Eric Erickson simply says,
“Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat,”
“the problem is, and this is where I deviate from Reagan, he instituted the Earned Income Tax Credit, it’s known as the EITC, and that effectively took many many Americans out of even having to pay any tax liability at all. I would do away with the EITC and if a person has $3 in income they would be subject to something.”
Rick Perry says:
“We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” he said. A few days later, asked about changing the nation’s entitlement mindset, Perry repeated that statistic and said: “One of the ways is [having] as many people as possible to be able to be helping pay for the government that we have in this country.”
“Having more people who are outside of the wagon pulling it … than having all the rest of us that are paying taxes pulling that wagon [is] one of the real answers. And that is a form of personal responsibility.”
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
These Republicans are not being incoherent and it isn’t that odd that they are calling for tax cuts for the rich while blocking them for the middle class and the working poor. They believe the moochers, looters and parasites should pay for the government so the John Galts can be free to run the world properly.
The joke is on the deluded Tea Partiers who think they are only going to raise taxes on someone else and deny benefits to the “welfare queens” who don’t deserve them. In reality, the Randroids think these Tea Partiers are a bunch of moochers and parasites too.
Update: Here’s Newtie from 2010:
[U]nder the Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama presidency, government has become a job-killing system thanks to a set of principles, policies, processes and people that are completely disconnected from reality.I describe this alien ideology in my book To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. It is a fundamentally anti-work, anti-investment, anti-entrepreneurial ideology that has led to economic stagnation and spiritual decay wherever it has been tried. We can already see the results of this radical ideology in America.The American work ethic is being replaced with a mindset that favors “gaming” the system to get away with working as little as possible. American productivity is being replaced with a set of union work rules and bureaucracy that makes us too slow, too expensive and too cumbersome…The secular-socialist machine of the left has made the recession worse by suppressing the natural resiliency of the American economy and setting the stage for even worse economic challenges in the future.