“Let’s assume that the Obama administration succeeds in collecting an extra $31.8 billion in taxes from the rich (and never mind the coming loss in tax revenues due to corporate profits evaporating and millions of unemployed Americans no longer earning taxable incomes). The president and his team would need to trim more than $800 billion from the deficit. Since total military spending—including expenses for Iraq and Afghanistan—will be approximately $664 billion this year, Obama could theoretically abolish defense spending and still not achieve his budgetary goal.
The only possible way to rein in runaway deficits is to slash runaway federal spending…..”
“Into the Financial Abyss,” Mark Hendrikson, Frontpage Magazine.
[*Thanks to Lew Rockwell for that twist to our President’s versatile name… ]
Adherents to the Socialist agenda have a strong pillar of faith on which to rely. Thomas Sowell once quipped that we economists have no faith because we have evidence. So when reality fails the Socialist he consoles himself with Scripture (Marx), not science, and when markets fail he turns to Keynes. Keynes’ famous quip that “In the long run we are all dead” is a profoundly satisfying justification for borrowing a trillion dollars, right now, never mind that it contradicts an essential insight of our discipline: in the words of Frédéric Bastiat from 1848: “The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen” – in other words, the long run.
But logic and verifiable historical evidence will not allay their ambitions for one second. They will all go flying over the cliff yelling: “Thanks be to Heaven, we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of economics,” to paraphrase Rousseau’s fictional Savoyard Vicar.
Good points…
another point –
The future that we hope will save us is always a projection…where we hope and pray that technological advances will somehow increase production to the point where our bad economic decision today (to postpone debt) can be wiped out
Yet, when statists call for more government because of some problem (diminishing agricultural returns or climate change) perceived in the present, why don’t they count on the future? Why don’t they have the same faith in future progress to save us?
It seems as if the future is something people evoke inconsistently, as it suits them…
Only one of innumerable logical fallacies that riddle social thought so-called..
Your clarity is refreshing. It bears repeating that Obamanomic policies are so attractive from a political perspective because they inevitably produce short-term benefits and/or relief. The long-term effects however are consistently detrimental. Yet those effects either materialize after several years or are disbursed over such a long period of time that few have the ability or will to ascertain the causal connection between the policies of yesteryear and the malaise of today.