The GOP idea factory

The flat earthers were all over the teevee yesterday.

But it's worth looking at the arguments Republicans have been offering. Both Mitch McConnell and George Will have put themselves in the untenable position of arguing that government spending prolonged the Great Depression but that government spending because of World War II ended the Great Depression. Will and McConnell argue not that government spending won't work, but that it'll only work if we spend the money on stuff the Republicans like. Maybe we should start another war? Meanwhile, the primary source for the argument that FDR made the Depression worse through government spending is a non-economist who simply ignores the numbers that don't fit her point.

The Republican Party pounced on a partial CBO report that said only 68% of the stimulus would be spent in the first eighteen months, than ignored the complete version that said 75% of it would be spent in the first eighteen months. Or at least, they ignored the part of the report that said the stimulus would help the economy, they did manage to take out of context the observation that the debt would hurt the economy if we didn't pay it down by 2019, in order to argue that in the long run, the stimulus "makes things worse."

Fortunately, Arnold Kling comes to the empirical rescue, still relying on the numbers from the partial CBO report rather than the more recent report, because he likes those numbers better. Oh, and in case you didn't know, our president is black so it's not a stimulus bill, it's a "reparations" bill. Also, we know the stimulus won't work because former government employee Michael Steele says "not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."

Yes, Kling actually calls it "reparations." And Michael Steele has apparently never met a fireman, a public school teacher, a road maintenance crew, a U.S. Congressman.

And if the TV listing this morning is correct, NBC is the only network carrying the president's news conference this evening.

The really shocking thing is, despite the so-called liberal media's fawning attention to Republican batshit, the public still supports stimulus spending.