(Paul Krugman is a Nobel winning economist, a columnist for the NY Times, and one of Buster's favorites. Here are a couple excerpts from his latest column.)
Voters don't have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets. So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.
And what they've been hearing since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending), and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?
In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem [imbalance between spending and revenues] requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs Americans really want.
But Republican leaders can't do that, of course. They refuse to admit that taxes ever need to rise, and they spent much of the past two years screaming "death panels!" in response to even the most modest, sensible efforts to ensure that Medicare dollars are well spent.
Paul, you are so right!
No comments:
Post a Comment