In this week's episode, guest host Ezra Klein shows us how to catch conservative anti-Romney types by taking an ordinary chunk of stupid Mark Halperin question, dipping it in magic Keynesian oil(Klein doesn't say, but it's probably Krugman's. That stuff stinks the most.), then presenting it as Romney is a Keynesian.
Klein finds the honey hole by trolling this stuff past Hot Air and getting Allahpundit to take his bait seriously, and then the anti-Romney conservatives practically jump into the boat in the comments section.
Sigh.
This is the stupid Halperin question:
Halperin: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
And here's Romney's entirely common sense response that Klein spins into some sort of Keynesian fantasy:
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course. What you do is you make adjustments on a basis that show, in the first year, actions that over time get you to a balanced budget. So I’m not saying I’m going to come up with ideas five or ten years from now that get us to a balanced budget. Instead I’m going to take action immediately by eliminating programs like Obamacare, which become more and more expensive down the road – by eliminating them, we get to a balanced budget. And I’d do it in a way that does not have a huge reduction in the first year, but instead has an increasing reduction as time goes on, and given the growth of the economy, you don’t have a reduction in the overall scale of the GDP. I don’t want to have us go into a recession in order to balance the budget. I’d like to have us have high rates of growth at the same time we bring down federal spending, on, if you will, a ramp that’s affordable, but that does not cause us to enter into a economic decline.
Allahpundit's emphasis in those first few lines.
One does not have to subscribe to Keynesian economic theory to realize that suddenly reducing the federal budget by more than 25% in one year is not only going to have a nasty economic shock, it will also wreak utter havoc throughout the federal government. It's not going to happen and any candidate, even the sainted Ronald Reagan, who proposed such a thing would never be elected. That's because something like that is solid evidence that the candidate is batshit crazy, and the swing vote will run away from him like the hounds of Hell are on their heels.
Acknowledging the above does not show Romney to be a Keynesian, it shows that he's sane. No more, no less. That some anti-Romney conservatives are so eager to slam the man that they would glom onto and take seriously something that Ezra Klein(Ezra Klein!) wrote does not speak well of them.
Please listen, my anti-Romney conservative friends. Ezra Klein is entirely a media operative of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. That's it. Everything he writes, everything, is in service to the goals of that group. One of the strategies of that group this election is to demoralize conservatives by making them think that there's not a damn bit of difference between Romney and Obama when there is actually an enormous gulf. They want you to stay home. Or they want you to vote for some quixotic candidate instead of Romney. Anything but vote for Romney.
I know some conservatives have legitimate concerns about Romney and I don't disparage them. I would though, ask that those conservatives take a step back and assess things again before they get in bed with the likes of Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman. Because that's what they are being manipulated into when they buy into Klein's BS spin.
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