Shocker. History Professor Is Terrible Economist
A Stanford professor named David Kennedy pens an editorial today in Bloomberg, showing why he is a good history professor but a terrible economist. And also that he's never actually been to a Tea Party.
Kennedy gives us a nice brief tour back through the Founding complete with Jefferson quotes and excerpts from Federalist No.10. All to the good but nothing remarkable there. Then he turns to what Barack Obama faces, negotiating the fiscal cliff with John Boehner's House caucus although he doesn't actually say it. As if to settle things, he references Mann and Ornstein's ridiculous caricature and scurrilous attack on the Tea Party as definitive - they're a bunch of nuts and Obama is cursed to have to deal with them, end of story because Mann and Ornstein say so. Can these nuts "get in touch with their inner Jefferson?" Kennedy closes.
The answer is, of course they can. I've actually been to a Tea Party and these people are thousands of times more reasonable and rational than the yard sign stealers, the Black Panthers "protecting" polling places in the City of Brothery Love, and the multiplicity of leftist thugs and half-wits that have paraded themselves around during the campaign. You see, the Tea Party wants essentially two things - a smaller, more Constitutionally faithful government, and the lower tax bill that comes with it. So, Prof. Kennedy, I ask? What is particularly nutty about that? If the Constitution is not relevant to today's society, stand up and just say it, rather than call people names.
Second, why is compromise necessary? If I want to drink milk and you want me to drink a cyanide solution, should we compromise and have me drink half milk/half cyanide? On that score, I'm going to stay pretty locked into my position. That is the economics behind Boehner's "Tea Party" Caucus versus President Obama. President Obama presides over a Leviathan government that is cracking at the seems, living on oceans of artificially cheap debt, and facing additional burdens in the near future that it can't handle. You could confiscate all the wealth of the 1% and you would sustain the current version of Leviathan for a handful of days, while ruining the economy in the bargain. To pay for tomorrow's version of Leviathan, you'd have to take 30% of the income of every family deemed middle class. Eighty percent of America goes broke in that scenario. There is no amount of money anywhere to pay for the heretofore accumulated Leviathan + Barack Obama's Dreams and yet still be America. There is if we want to be Spain, France or Greece. That's the cyanide. Insisting that America not go there, that's not courting failure, that's keeping it at bay.
I suggest Prof. Kennedy walk down the hall or across campus, whichever the case, and have a chit-chat with Michael Boskin or John Taylor to get up to speed on our fiscal imbalances and the macro-economic issues at play here.
Kennedy gives us a nice brief tour back through the Founding complete with Jefferson quotes and excerpts from Federalist No.10. All to the good but nothing remarkable there. Then he turns to what Barack Obama faces, negotiating the fiscal cliff with John Boehner's House caucus although he doesn't actually say it. As if to settle things, he references Mann and Ornstein's ridiculous caricature and scurrilous attack on the Tea Party as definitive - they're a bunch of nuts and Obama is cursed to have to deal with them, end of story because Mann and Ornstein say so. Can these nuts "get in touch with their inner Jefferson?" Kennedy closes.
The answer is, of course they can. I've actually been to a Tea Party and these people are thousands of times more reasonable and rational than the yard sign stealers, the Black Panthers "protecting" polling places in the City of Brothery Love, and the multiplicity of leftist thugs and half-wits that have paraded themselves around during the campaign. You see, the Tea Party wants essentially two things - a smaller, more Constitutionally faithful government, and the lower tax bill that comes with it. So, Prof. Kennedy, I ask? What is particularly nutty about that? If the Constitution is not relevant to today's society, stand up and just say it, rather than call people names.
Second, why is compromise necessary? If I want to drink milk and you want me to drink a cyanide solution, should we compromise and have me drink half milk/half cyanide? On that score, I'm going to stay pretty locked into my position. That is the economics behind Boehner's "Tea Party" Caucus versus President Obama. President Obama presides over a Leviathan government that is cracking at the seems, living on oceans of artificially cheap debt, and facing additional burdens in the near future that it can't handle. You could confiscate all the wealth of the 1% and you would sustain the current version of Leviathan for a handful of days, while ruining the economy in the bargain. To pay for tomorrow's version of Leviathan, you'd have to take 30% of the income of every family deemed middle class. Eighty percent of America goes broke in that scenario. There is no amount of money anywhere to pay for the heretofore accumulated Leviathan + Barack Obama's Dreams and yet still be America. There is if we want to be Spain, France or Greece. That's the cyanide. Insisting that America not go there, that's not courting failure, that's keeping it at bay.
I suggest Prof. Kennedy walk down the hall or across campus, whichever the case, and have a chit-chat with Michael Boskin or John Taylor to get up to speed on our fiscal imbalances and the macro-economic issues at play here.
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:07 AM
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