The GOP Economy - Bad News for Most of Us

With much of the world economy looking posed to fall back into recession, the GOP is hell bent to inflict more of the economic policy that has failed globally.  The outlook, if this happens, is not good for anyone except perhaps the ultra- wealthy who can weather the economic gloom.  Even more maddening is the refusal of the media to stop merely parroting GOP sound bites.  And then there's Obama and the Democrats timidity in placing blame where blame belongs: at the feet of the GOP.  Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks at the GOP's disingenuous con job and what it could mean for the future.  Here are highlights:

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years.

[T]he Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed. 

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. 

Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. .  .  .   .  responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House. 

That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. 

Republicans have been warning that we were about to turn into Greece because President Obama was doing too much to boost the economy; Keynesian economists like myself warned that we were, on the contrary, at risk of turning into Japan because he was doing too little. And Japanification it is, except with a level of misery the Japanese never had to endure. 

So why don’t voters know any of this? 

Part of the answer is that far too much economic reporting is still of the he-said, she-said variety, with dueling quotes from hired guns on either side. But it’s also true that the Obama team has consistently failed to highlight Republican obstruction

At this point, however, Mr. Obama and his political team  .  .  .  .  Their best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be. 

[W]e have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work.