“Those guys are on automatic,” Clinton said during an interview on CNN’s “American Morning.” “They have a — you know, you punch a button and they give you the answer they give you.”
His use of the description 'automatic' is interesting because it strikes me as a spot-on description of what the Republicans propose -- a market system in which tax cuts are the answer to everything. Except for their three Northeast senators, the entire GOP congress voted against the stimulus plan as 'big government.' In rejecting the plan, they used the same logic they've used since the early 1990s. The GOP wants to preclude economic planning of any sort, and put all their eggs in cutting taxes. When something happens, regardless of the conditions, the answer is the same -- lower taxes.
Anything different than that viewpoint is 'socialism.'
Now, I like tax cuts and believe they have a place in good economic policy. But a hypothesis of mine is that Americans are starting, slowly, to see that a theory with such dedication to its truth without regard to reality can't help but often be wrong.
In this sense, as knowledge, President Obama's stimulus plan represents the mind to use public logic and government institutions to counter socially destructive consequences of economic activity, especially those events that threaten the capacity for free economic activity in the first place. That it is good for markets to employ this more thoughtful understanding of how they work.
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