A big ole hat tip to IDemo @ Democratic Underground for this!
I am shocked! Shocked I tell you!
The Wall Street Journal published this oped piece? Wah?
Alan Blinder WROTE it?
The WST PUBLISHED it?
Is it just maybe, a little bit, possible some folks in this country are beginning to come to their senses?
By ALAN S. BLINDER
It was the British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously wrote that ideas, "both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else." Right now, I'm worried about the damage that might be done by one particularly wrong-headed idea: the notion that, in stark contrast to Keynes's teaching, government spending destroys jobs.
No, that's not a typo. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans regularly rail against "job-killing government spending." Think about that for a minute. The claim is that employment actually declines when federal spending rises. Using the same illogic, employment should soar if we made massive cuts in public spending—as some are advocating right now.
Acting on such a belief would imperil a still-shaky economy that is not generating nearly enough jobs. So let's ask: How, exactly, could more government spending "kill jobs"?
It is easy, but irrelevant, to understand how someone might object to any particular item in the federal budget—whether it is the war in Afghanistan, ethanol subsidies, Social Security benefits, or building bridges to nowhere. But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them. Dumb public spending deserves to be rejected—but not because it kills jobs.
snip
...And as long as one political party clings to the idea that government spending kills jobs, it's hard to see how we extricate ourselves from this mess. As Keynes understood, ideas, whether right or wrong, have consequences.
Read more here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576392023187860688.html