The fixing that's necessary is not about ideology; it's about nuts and bolts. If we fail to see the insanity of what we are
doing, we are all headed down the
same chute into whatever history will call a First World nation that crawls
backward into a Third World swamp. Click here for source article
As Paul Krugman recently pointed out in the NYT, the Repugs are trying desperately to peddle the myth that President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, and that in spite of that, unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can't create jobs, they say.
The problem with this canard, says Krugman, is that there never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of economic expansion (e.g. infrastructure spending) that might have created the millions of jobs we desperately need.
Don't believe it? Then ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn't kicked in yet, so that can't be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. So where's all that spending we keep hearing about? The fact is, it never happened.
Yes, some spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen -- because, in case you haven't noticed, the lack of infrastructure spending programs has led to a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of that money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And those major new programs never materialized. They don't exist.
And what about the new government bureaucracies that some Republicans keep yammering about? In fact, the total number of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr. Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level -- most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers. As a result, total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January 2009.
Therefore, the big government expansion the Repugs keep blathering about never actually happened.
This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009, so why didn't that translate into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never happened, why does everyone think it did?
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