Told you so
by digby
They have no shame. None:
“After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope. The uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: The expectation of a new republican congress.”
That’s good old Mitch McConnell. He said it with a straight face.
This is what they do. Back in the 90s when the economy started to grow strongly under President Clinton after they all voted against his economic plan claiming it was going to take the country into a depression, they all claimed it was the cuts they insisted upon in subsequent budget deals that ushered in that boom.
I wrote this a while back about the utter failure of Sam Brownback’s dystopian budget “experiment”:
It’s probably true that the economy will improve a bit soon, barring some new calamity. And when that happens, his “experiment” will wrongly get the credit. All the suffering, the long term degradation of services for the needy, the ongoing economic insecurity will be lost in the celebration of improving numbers that are happening in spite of Brownback’s nihilistic philosophy rather than because of it.
This is the essence of our problem and goes right back to that famous quote by John Maynard Keynes. He was responding to the assurance by economists that in the long run everything would work out:
But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.
In a capitalist system, it’s the upheavals and dislocation in the short run (“the tempestuous seasons”) that destroy lives and consigns some people to great poverty even as it rewards others with great wealth. The result is often an unstable society and tremendous pain for many people. Keynesians believe the role of government is to try to even things out, prevent and mitigate undue suffering for humans as the system goes through its destructive cycles.
Conservatives like Brownback see capitalism as a sort of sacred, supernatural force and believe that their angry market God requires human sacrifice in order to be appeased. When the suffering abates, as it does eventually, they will feel sanctified emerge with their beliefs in suffering (for others) as a purification ritual intact. “See, I told you it would work!”
In fact, the only thing any politicians can really get credit for in these situations is how well they mitigate the suffering and contain the damage. The Democrats and President Obama didn’t do enough. And they’ve been insisting there was a recovery pretty constantly for years even though it was tepid at best until recently. But they did do something. The Republicans did everything in their power to stop any government action that would be useful and went out of their way to make things worse.
But as I noted in the piece I quote above, this is what they think recoveries are all about: suffering.Nobody ever said it better than Hoover advisor Andrew Mellon:
“liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people,”
Take them at their word. They’re not playing.
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