Getting Perspective

Here's a nice post by Paul Krugman that points out that all that false rage by Republicans over "extravagant" spending in the stimulus package overlooks the idiotic extravagance of the Republicans in using the public purse to hand out freebies to their rich friends:

Breathtaking and staggering

Dean Baker is having some fun with the Washington Post, which keeps looking for superlatives to describe the “staggering”, “breathtaking” expense of the stimulus plan. And Dean is quite right to point out that reasonable estimates of the shortfall in private demand are on the order of three times the $800 billion package. (Jan Hatzius at Goldman, using different methods, arrives at more or less the same number.)

One other comparison worth making, however, is with the Bush tax cuts, which will end up having cost about $2 trillion over the course of a decade — without anything like the economic rationale for the stimulus. Did the Post find this cost staggering? Inquiring minds want to know.