Suffering bullshit: it takes a professional

Asked by Businessweek how he would achieve a balanced budget, Mitt Romney flipped on his GOP autopilot: 

[R]aising taxes ... depresses growth. And so like a dog chasing its tail, you can’t get to a balanced budget by simply raising taxes. As a matter of fact, it is ultimately counterproductive.

As a matter of fact, Bill Clinton revealed this as prodigiously false. Republicans railed at his 1993 tax increase as a job destroyer and economy killer, they said the markets would plunge, millions would be hurled from work, America would fall into a sinkhole of despair. Remember?

In a way, Romney is correct. Clinton's tax increase didn't balance the budget. It threw it into surplus, along with the "counterproductive" creation of 22 million jobs (roughly 10 times greater than under the tax-cutting, deficit-bloating Bush II administration).

Now I can only assume that you, as a hapless journalistic amateur, would direct Mr. Romney's attention to these assorted, immovable facts, right after he had dumped his autopiloted bullshit in your lap. But that only goes to prove what an amateur you are. Businessweek followed up with a question regarding job contraction in the public sector and whether, for government-shrinking conservatives, this is a "positive" or "negative" development.

Which is probably why a "Romney adviser" soon sidled over to "[inform] the governor that the campaign had agreed to a longer interview."

Comments

[Turgidson]

This is one of Krugman's zombie lies. Doesn't matter how many times it's debunked, it lives on.

Some of our most sustained growth was during the years of unthinkably high marginal tax rates at the top end. The Clinton tax hikes were followed by an expansion much longer than the normal cycle. The Bush tax CUTS? Meager growth followed by a crushing collapse and huge deficits.

And yet, the zombie lie soldiers on. Only the "shrill" and "unserious" like Krugman even bother to point out the lie, because the truth would hurt some elites' and/or "job creators" feelings and we can't have that.

Bring on the meteor already.