2003 - From Paul Krugman -- my, my, my!

Paul Krugman wrote this back in 2003 -- and now we are selling off damn near every part of The Commons that's left.
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Stating The Obvious
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 27, 2003


''The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.'' So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. Indeed, the legislation is doubly absurd: the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises.

But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that ''more extreme Republicans'' actually want a fiscal train wreck: ''Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.''

Good for The Financial Times. It seems that stating the obvious has now, finally, become respectable.

It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues -- that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut -- was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories.