I get mail from Mitt Romney
by David Atkins
In addition to all the mail I get from Democratic/progressive candidates and organizations, I also get mail from a variety of conservative interest groups and candidates. They seem to believe I’m a significant donor.
Here’s one of the latest pieces I received from Mitt Romney:
Dear David,
I am running for President of the United States and because you are one of America’s most notable Republicans, I want to personally let you know why. It’s simple, really. I believe in America.
Yes Mitt, thank you. I truly am one of the nation’s most notable Republicans. Karl Rove has my cell phone number on speed dial. You run a campaign of remarkable honest and humility.
Anyway, what is Romney’s main argument? Once again, it’s that going into debt has somehow hurt the economy:
President Obama’s policies created a deeper recession and hampered our efforts to recover. He has mortgaged our future, increased spending by more than 20%, and allowed our debt to skyrocket. The consequence is soaring numbers of Americans enduring unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies.
As we all know, this argument is perverse. There’s an argument to be had over whether increasing debt is truly harmful for the country over the long term. But there’s no rational argument in the world to suggest that it harms an economy in the short term. So long as borrowing costs remain low–and they do–it doesn’t damage the economy at all. It can only help.
That Romney is sending out this message to his base of ostensibly wealthy and presumably mostly well educated donors is mindboggling. It means that there is a large part of this country that not only has little in the way of critical thinking skills or economic knowledge, but has bought hook, line and sinker into a totally counterfactual understanding of fiscal policy. To state that high unemployment is a direct result of government debt is as demonstrably false as claiming that the sun revolves around the earth.
As I said before:
The big lie still remains: under no circumstances whatsoever has the spending or the deficit hurt economic recovery. There’s not even a coherent argument based in economic fantasy to claim such a thing. In order for spending to hurt an economy, it would have to do so by causing a deficit. Spending alone has zero negative impact on an economy, unless it comes theoretically at the cost of increased taxes–also not harmful in the right proportions, but irrelevant since the President has actually lowered taxes since taking office.
So spending isn’t a problem. What about the deficit? Well, deficits are only a problem if they lead to inflation and if they make it harder to borrow money–the latter only a problem because it causes forced austerity measures which weaken an economy (I needn’t mention that these would be the same austerity measures Mr. Romney would like to impose on us in advance.) The country doesn’t have a serious inflation problem (as Paul Krugman has been noting incessantly), and despite S&P’s bogus downgrade of U.S. debt, the Treasuries market hasn’t suffered. Not only has it not suffered, but one hedge fund manager “earned” (a word I’ll use very loosely) $3.9 billion last year mostly from investments in U.S. treasuries.
So we have low taxes, low inflation, and a strong Treasuries market. Under those circumstances, it is quite literally economically impossible for government spending to have “deepened the recession and delayed the recovery.” At worst it had no impact–and nearly every economist agrees that that itself is also untrue. Government spending had a considerable effect on lowering unemployment.
If we had a real press establishment in this country, it would be constantly at pains to point this out. Instead, we get Erin Burnett running a quotidian tracker of how many days it’s been since the country lost its all-important AAA rating from the unassailable S&P ratings agency. As if it mattered a whit.
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