Not a fan of Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times, but today he correctly levels a charge against the GOP that is on target and deserved. I have often said that the Republicans are good with the bullhorn but over the past 10 years, when push came to shove over budget issues they were not willing to do the hard work. Krugman:

The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

Krugman of course will argue against proposed cuts, but he has a valid point. The cuts will have to come from the very popular programs - Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Defense, Social Security and Major Health Programs make up 61% of the budget*. This is where big government lives. For many years I have believed that - like Nixon going to China - it would take a Democrat to make headway in reforming Medicare and Social Security, but it will also require the willingness of a serious opposition. With the current GOP leadership of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner the opposition is not serious.  

Time to step up and do some heavy lifting, not just point fingers at the other guy.

* Defense and international security: 21 percent of the budget, or $625 billion; Social Security:  21 percent of the budget, or $617 billion; Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP: 20 percent of the budget, or $599 billion. ($391 billion went to Medicare)  

Source: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

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Econstories.tv rap Hayek vs. Keynes: Fear The Boom and Bust - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.

Once again from The Daily Dish: 

Abraham Lincoln’s General Orders, 100 Instructions for the government of the armies of the United States in the field. 

“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty–that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. 

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good . . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.