The GOP Myth of 'Job-Killing' Spending - WSJ

[cbdo2007]

The GOP Myth of 'Job-Killing' Spending

Drastic expenditure cuts would imperil a shaky economy that still isn't generating enough jobs.

By ALAN S. BLINDER
It was the British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously wrote that ideas, "both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else." Right now, I'm worried about the damage that might be done by one particularly wrong-headed idea: the notion that, in stark contrast to Keynes's teaching, government spending destroys jobs.

No, that's not a typo. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans regularly rail against "job-killing government spending." Think about that for a minute. The claim is that employment actually declines when federal spending rises. Using the same illogic, employment should soar if we made massive cuts in public spending—as some are advocating right now.

Acting on such a belief would imperil a still-shaky economy that is not generating nearly enough jobs. So let's ask: How, exactly, could more government spending "kill jobs"?

It is easy, but irrelevant, to understand how someone might object to any particular item in the federal budget—whether it is the war in Afghanistan, ethanol subsidies, Social Security benefits, or building bridges to nowhere. But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them. Dumb public spending deserves to be rejected—but not because it kills jobs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576392023187860688.html

[pinto]

1. Big kick.

:kick:

[OHdem10]

2. Ahhhh. Some Truth and Logic.

[housewolf]

3. Very good article and well worth a read of the entire article

Having a hard time believing it's from the Wall Street Journal though!

Thanks for posting!

[NewJeffCT]

5. They actually had an editorial a while back

praising the stimulus for helping the economy- and, this was an editorial, not an op-ed like the article above.

[NewJeffCT]

4. excellent article - K&R

and, in the WSJ, to boot.

[CatWoman]

8. i'm still picking myself up off the floor

:)

[gratuitous]

6. Oh, but zombie lies are powerful things

And as long as they're boomed out in authoritative tones, even one feeble little article in the Wall Street Journal can't hope to contend with the zombie lie of job-killing government spending. When Blinder says "Think about that for a minute," the zombie lie has slipped its leash and is running free through the public discourse. The only way to combat it is to knock it down every time it shows up. But that's far too much work and takes way too much time out of the 24-hour news cycle. It's just easier and quicker to let the zombie lie go. Someone else can knock it down.

[TrogL]

7. Keynes shoutout!!

[Scurrilous]

9. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Sarah Ibarruri]

10. In conversations with right wingers, I always bring this up

However, they don't care. I think they already realize this. They just don't like it and lie to make it seem as if government did not create jobs. I'm not 100% sure why they don't like this. I suspect they like a world in which private wealthy citizens are the only law of the land, and the rest can go f*** themselves. A central government scares the hell out of them because it keeps control on the powerful, and perhaps they believe that God endowed the powerful with certain rights over the rest of us.

I don't know.

[wysimdnwyg]

11. Wait a minute...

Hang on, did the Journal get hacked? Surely there's not a cogent and rational argument in favor of Keynesian theory in the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal.