Goldberg: “When the GOP’s 7 Dwarfs Debate the Economy, Dopey Writes the Script”

David Streeter — June 20, 2011 – 4:12 pm | Economy | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

Former Forward editor J.J. Goldberg published an interesting take on the Republican Party’s economic policies gives his take on why Jews simply are not buying their ideas.

Goldberg wrote:

I’d like to think Jews vote the way they do because they come from a tradition that forbids that sort of naked competition. Because they’re heirs to a set of laws that require economic regulation (‘Thou shalt not have diverse weights and measures,’ Deuteronomy 25:13), a tax-supported government bureaucracy (‘unto the children of Levi I have given all the tithe in Israel in return for their service,’ Numbers 18:21) and compulsory redistribution of income (‘thou shalt not reap the corners of thy field; thou shalt leave them for the poor,’ Leviticus 19:9).

And:

I’d like to propose my own theory as to why most Jews don’t vote Republican ... they recognize a dopey idea when they hear one.

You can usually tell a dopey idea by reading it out loud to see if it makes any sense. Check whether the numbers add up. Look to see whether it’s been tried before and if it worked. And if you’re looking for really dopey ideas, you can’t do better than a Republican presidential debate. At this latest one, the seven candidates were happily united behind a list of whoppers that didn’t even come close to adding up and had already failed colossally, and they were flogging them like a dead horse.

He examined some of the GOP’s economic points individually:

The biggest and dopiest was the persistent notion that the way to create jobs and get America out of its lingering doldrums is to lower taxes on corporations and the rich and to do away with regulation of business. The idea seems to be that if you leave rich people with larger amounts of money and lay off the pollution and safety stuff they will invest their bounty in creating and expanding businesses, thus generating new workplaces, which will increase the general affluence and pull America out of its hole.

Here’s the tip-off that this makes no sense: Businesses right now are sitting on $2 trillion in liquid cash that they’re not investing and have no immediate plans to invest. They don’t see the demand out there to justify making new products. You read that right: two trillion dollars. That’s according to June figures from the Federal Reserve.

And:

It’s not as though reducing taxes and lifting regulations hasn’t been tried already. It’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years, ever since Ronald Reagan became president. America today isn’t over-taxed. It has one of the lowest overall tax burdens - counting all taxes, from all levels of government, as a percentage of GDP - in the industrialized world. As of 2008, only Mexico and Chile had lower taxes, according to the authoritative Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The result is our present economy. Lowering taxes hasn’t boosted output and created a bigger tax base. It’s simply reduced government’s revenue, leaving huge deficits to pile up every year except for a brief period during the Democratic Clinton presidency. Total national debt has ballooned steadily from $0.9 trillion owed in 1980 to $11 trillion in George W. Bush’s last budget year to the $14 trillion we owe today.

But haven’t lower taxes and less regulation created prosperity and good jobs? Dream on.

 

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