Steve Benen has an important post up today at Political Animal, discussing the GOP’s recently-unveiled and badly misnamed “Jobs bill.”
As Benen points out, “the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.
Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.
The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.”
The entire post is well worth reading.
Way back when I became politically active, I bought into the theory that tax cuts for the wealthy would spur investment, and that investment would create jobs. It made a lot of sense; unfortunately, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn’t work that way.
The ability to change ones opinion when faced with new evidence is how humans learn and thrive. When people “double down” on beliefs even when faced with facts debunking those beliefs, we call that a delusion.
Wasn’t that their energy independence program, their economic stimulus program, and their balanced budget program?