The Weeds Keep Cropping Up

The right wing nuts in Canada, e.g. the Fraser Institute, is meeting with the Finance Minister to give the standard right wing "medicine" for financial ills:

• cut taxes for the rich
• eliminate capital gains
• reduce corporate taxes

and, uh, "harmonize" the GST and PST. Details are here.

Funny... this has been the "medicine" the right has administered for the last 30-40 years with the promise of wealth and prosperity (such as the "new morning in America" mantra of Reagan).

The truth is that while there is some benefit to unleashing entrepreneurial energy the fanatics have called for "shrink government" and "privatize" and "deregulate" until they have created a world in which the rich are fabulously wealth while the public sphere is in tatters and the great majority are struggling. They have delivered economic calamity, not paradise.

But, despite the obvious failure of their ideology, they are still out there pushing their phony "medicine". In the US, Obama is working on a stimulus plan (something conservatives here are convinced they don't need, just "balanced budgets" like Herbert Hoover delivered in the Great Depression, that's the right medicine!).

The right wing ideologues are purple with indignation that Obama is proposing a $775 billion stimulus program. That has the right apoplectic. Too expensive! It will balloon the debt! (Funny, economists like Paul Krugman argue this is too little and runs the risk of being a costly failure, i.e. money wasted an not even a partial improvement.)

Funny... this same "deficit hawk" right wing chorus didn't say anything about the cost of...

• the $3 trillion cost for an unnecessary war that Bush as "decider" declared again Iraq, a country with no Al Qaeda and no "weapons of mass destruction". (Click here for a nice graphic that argues that the full cost is $3 trillion.)
  

• the $1.8 trillion in Bush tax cuts for the rich (Click here.)
  

• the ridiculous mishandling of the US economy a $1.2 trillion deficit for US federal government fiscal budget for 2009:

[On Jan 7, 2009] the Congressional Budget Office projected a 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion, nearly a threefold increase from 2008. The federal budget — already deep in deficit after years of tax cutting while waging two wars — is being pushed further into the red by a recession that is now more than a year old and has no end in sight. (NY Times)

The posturing by the ideological right is absurd. Deficits and big debt is fine is we do it, but how dare you spend money to get the economy out of the gutter? What's even more absurd is the expectation that people will keep listening to this ideological cant after the demonstration over the last 30+ years that this political philosophy doesn't deliver the economic goods to the people. Sure, the rich got fabulously wealthy, but the purpose of government is not to coddle the rich (although it sure looks that way by how fast the US government rushed in to give hundreds of trillions to Wall Street with no accountability).

So... in Canada, the right -- as exemplified by the Fraser Institute -- is still playing the old game of cut taxes for the rich, deregulate, privatize. It hasn't delivered the economic goods. There has been no "trickle down" from this economics. It is time to usher this pathetic ideology off the stage of history and into the dustbin of failed ideas.