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Entry: Confessions of a Bitter Old Reactionary Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/confessions_of_a_bitter_old_reactionary#23642 Post contents: Tregarth sed: "Joe Populist, the Keynesian welfare/warfare state and FED easy money go hand in hand….” Well, not really. Milton Friedman supposedly disproved Keynes on the great depression, and won the Noble Prize for allegedly proving that the whole mess was created by a contraction in the money supply, not overproduction. After that, public spending was out, and easy credit was in. The rest is history. What has created the deficit mess we are was not Keynes--which is old hat, but “liberatarian” supply side economics. It is supply side economics--also free market gobbly-gook---that has created the huge increase in deficit spending that have plagued the US economy since Reagan. As silly as the Laffler curve was---as is most of the free market fundamentalist garbage that comes out of the “libertarian” right---you have to at least acknowledge that supply side theory advocated paying for tax cuts with spending cuts. But defeating the “evil empire” was more important to Reagan than making the defense cuts that were necessary to fund his tax cuts, and we got huge deficits. Bush2 took this crapola to new heights with his tax cuts, which were really funded by spending the Social Security payroll tax surplus---and of course his “war on terrorism”…. In fact, “Libertarian” political economy is plainly now the new “free lunch” ---the idea that we can merely cut taxes without cutting spending, and magically---we say magically because supply side “libertarian political economy is largely based on voodoo---there was supposed to be enough growth to generate enough new tax revenue to offset the deficits they created. The truth is the from Reagan on, supply side has never worked, it’s never created enough new growth to replace the tax revenue that it consumed. Like most so-called “free market” economic theory, it’s all bull-toss. So you see, Mr. Tregarth, all of the problems we see now, have nothing to do with Keynesian economics, and everything to do with “libertarian”--or voodoo---economics. For a taste of reality, I’d suggest you dig up David Stockman’s old book, The Triumph of Politics, and you might learn how idiotic Reaganomics was, and how much “free market” economics is based on ideological nonsense. Sent at: 2008 07 20