Wednesday, February 08, 2012

How nations die: GOP mandates 2+1=4

The modern GOP is in the final stages of a form of political dementia:
Bruce Bartlett: Tilting the Budget Process to the G.O.P. - NYTimes.com

On Feb. 3, the House passed H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012...

... The legislation would require that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation do a “dynamic” analysis of major legislation – defined as that with a gross budgetary impact greater than 0.25 percent of the gross domestic product. Such an analysis would calculate the impact on real G.D.P. growth, the capital stock and labor supply.

The dynamic calculation would be supplementary and not replace the current official scoring methodology, but the obvious long-term goal is to require official revenue estimates to incorporate “Laffer curve” effects in order to make it easier to cut taxes and harder to raise them...

... this fits into a pattern – since getting control of Congress in 1995, Republicans have often abolished institutions that they couldn’t turn into puppet organizations for promoting their agenda...

... Republicans don’t really care about accurate revenue estimates; they just want them to show that tax cuts pay for themselves, so they can pass more of them without constraint. As my fellow Economix contributor Simon Johnson has noted, the corruption of the agencies that produce budget data is a crucial cause of Europe’s debt crisis.
For the modern GOP, Orwell's 1984 is an operations manual.

We're living in a race condition. Which will die first -- America or the GOP?

If it's the GOP, there's a good chance it will be reincarnated as a rational party. If it's America, not so good.

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