German Style Austerity Has Failed In Europe... So Why Are Romney, Ryan And The GOP Trying To Import It Here?

Back in the 1930's there were dozens of Republican congressmen who looked at Hitler's achievements and Mussolini's achievements in Europe and wanted nothing more than to import fascism to the United States. Many American industrialists and plutocrats were willing to finance those endeavors. The extreme right in this country has always been fascinated by fascism-- and has always found oligarchs, from the DuPonts and J.P. Morgan to the Koch brothers to put up the cash to undermine democracy. And this treason has never been punished. It continues today because no one was ever held accountable. That's the way a system of, by and for the one percent works.

Sunday Paul Krugman continued his attempt to educate NY Times readers about the abject failure of Austerity in Europe. Keep in mind that there's a reason why Krugman won a Nobel Prize for Economics and why Republican Budget Chairman and Ayn Rand disciple Paul Ryan couldn't win a debate in front of an 8th grade class about the same subject. Sunday his worry was with David Cameron's economically foundering Britain, which is foolishly "choosing to emulate both the United States and the troubled nations of Europe when it doesn’t have to-- all in the name of an economic theory that was foolish two years ago, and completely discredited now." But Krugman did an even better job last week destroying the underpinnings of German-style Austerity-- as practiced by, for example, failed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker-- in an appearance on Bill Maher's Real Time. Watch Krugman eviscerate ridiculous right-wing ideologue Arthur Laffer:



Krugman explains all you need to know about Austerity and even Laffer, starts off acknowledging he was right before going off into a crackpot right-wing ideological fantasy that has proven itself inadequate to solve real world problems whenever it has been tried. Laffer: "Paul's completely right; we are in a depression. This has been the longest, worst recovery ever. It's just terrible." He should have quit right there because nothing else he said was worth a bucket of spit... and he gave Krugman the opportunity to remind everyone that Republicans and Gordon Gekko were wrong about greed being good. "The fact of the matter is, there's no evidence of that. Where was the productivity surge? It never happened. Where were the big gains for workers? That never happened. All that happened was that a few people-- some of them running for president-- made a lot of money... and a lot of that money came, effectively, from breaking contracts."

Yesterday, Krugman's Times column was all about big fiscal phonies, particularly Paul Ryan and Chris Christie.

The attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Ryan has somehow acquired a reputation as a stern fiscal hawk despite offering budget proposals that, far from being focused on deficit reduction, are mainly about cutting taxes for the rich while slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. In fact, once you strip out Mr. Ryan’s “magic asterisks”-- claims that he will somehow increase revenues and cut spending in ways that he refuses to specify-- what you’re left with are plans that would increase, not reduce, federal debt.

The same can be said of Mitt Romney, who claims that he will balance the budget but whose actual proposals consist mainly of huge tax cuts (for corporations and the wealthy, of course) plus a promise not to cut defense spending.

Both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney, then, are fake deficit hawks. And the evidence for their fakery isn’t just their bad arithmetic; it’s the fact that for all their alleged deep concern over budget gaps, that concern isn’t sufficient to induce them to give up anything-- anything at all-- that they and their financial backers want. They’re willing to snatch food from the mouths of babes (literally, via cuts in crucial nutritional aid programs), but that’s a positive from their point of view-- the social safety net, says Mr. Ryan, should not become “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Maintaining low taxes on profits and capital gains, and indeed cutting those taxes further, are, however, sacrosanct.