:: Running from the Thought Police ::

:: Thursday, January 29, 2004 ::

They're Mad As Hell...

Brad Delong explains (eloquently, as always) why his fellow economists and himself are no longer the centrist, bipartisan people they once were.

We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it.

Before Bush the Lesser, both parties were, in economists eyes at least, equally uninformed and single-minded when it came to fiscal policies. Things have changed, and so have the economists.

:: The Squire 1:30 AM :: email this post :: ::
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