Placing the Blame Where It Belongs

There's an interesting article from Bruce Bartlett, a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in the New York Times.

In "Blaming Obama for George W. Bush's Policies," Bartlett points out that it was Bush's tax cuts, Bush's wars in the Middle East, and Bush's Medicare Part D that turned the $236 billion surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed to Bush into a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2009. And it was Dick Cheney, Bush's VP, who said that deficits don't matter.

Bartlett then likens the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama managed to push through Congress to an inadequate dose of medicine. Obama's advisors (and economists like Paul Krugman) said this was too small. It was like a tuberculosis patient taking only half the antibiotics: the disease is suppressed, but not cured. That's why there aren't more jobs: consumers don't have enough cash on hand to increase demand for products, so businesses can't hire more people to increase production.

Bartlett ends his piece with:

But it was Republican policies during the Bush administration that brought on the sickness and Republicans in Congress who have denied the economy an adequate dosage of the cure. Now they want to implicitly blame President Obama for causing the recession and the failure of stimulus to fix the problem, asserting that fiscal stimulus is per se ineffective.

There is a word for this: chutzpah.

There's another word for it: sabotage. Republicans have done everything they can to keep the economy in the tank to gain partisan advantage in the 2012 election.

Now Paul Ryan, the apostle of Ayn Rand, has been anointed to deliver the ultimatum of economic blackmail: give the wealthy gigantic tax cuts or they'll tank the economy again.