Economist Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times on May 27, 2012:
“Until now the attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Ryan has somehow acquired a reputation as a stern fiscal hawk despite offering budget proposals that, far from being focused on deficit reduction, are mainly about cutting taxes for the rich while slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. In fact, once you strip out Mr. Ryan’s “magic asterisks” — claims that he will somehow increase revenues and cut spending in ways that he refuses to specify — what you’re left with are plans that would increase, not reduce, federal debt.
“The same can be said of Mitt Romney, who claims that he will balance the budget but whose actual proposals consist mainly of huge tax cuts (for corporations and the wealthy, of course) plus a promise not to cut defense spending.
“Both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney, then, are fake deficit hawks. And the evidence for their fakery isn’t just their bad arithmetic; it’s the fact that for all their alleged deep concern over budget gaps, that concern isn’t sufficient to induce them to give up anything — anything at all — that they and their financial backers want. They’re willing to snatch food from the mouths of babes (literally, via cuts in crucial nutritional aid programs), but that’s a positive from their point of view — the social safety net, says Mr. Ryan, should not become “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Maintaining low taxes on profits and capital gains, and indeed cutting those taxes further, are, however, sacrosanct.”
The larger fiscal problem we have is the result of Romney’s and Ryan’s policies that will result in the continued hoarding of ownership of productive capital by the top 1 percent, who own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption. Their policies continue to deny ordinary Americans, who do not have sufficient “past savings” to “risk” in the “casino stock market,” real income-producing participation in the future formation of productive capital assets held by our business corporations. As a result their policies and program will continue to beggar their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/opinion/krugman-fiscal-phonies.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share
