Perhaps one of the best things I’ve seen come through my inbox these past several days is an op-ed in the New York Times by a former financial official in the Reagan Treasury Department where he all but comes clean about the ridiculous damage that the Republican party has done to the US Economy, and how the blame – as it should be – is laid squarely at the feet of the Bush Administration and their fiscal policies of unregulated, laissez-faire business practices.

Instead of regulating the industries that are falling apart around us today by leaking oil into our waterways or foreclosing on our homes, the Bush Administration claimed that the best way to keep the economy going was to let the party keep rolling, no matter what the damage in the long run – and we’re seeing that damage now (and may not see the end of it for generations.)

And yet, Republicans in Congress want to continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy – you remember the ones, the ones that were supposed to stimulate so much job growth and investment in small businesses but did neither of those things (but did wind up as a massive payout to the wealthiest few percent of the American populace?) Of course you do, as does David Stockman:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.

Stockman then goes on to explain the four significant ways that these policies have caused serious harm to the US economy, and what their true impact may be. He even twists the screws a bit on the topic of our out-of-control military spending, which seems to be skyrocketing regardless of the party you support (although Democrats have lately expressed interest in bringing in the military budget and Defense Secretary Gates asked his generals to find areas where they could trim the fat.)

The entire piece is worth a read, especially if you find you have a short memory for fiscal policy, or if you know a right-winger who thinks the economy only tanked when President Obama took office and seek to blame him. There’s plenty of blame to go around – the real problem is that the political right doesn’t have the will to actually fix the problem.

[ Four Deformations of the Apocalypse ]
Source: The New York Times