“And what if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a Kemp-Roth tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards. ” —Irving Kristol, the “Father of Neo-Conservatism,” as well as the father of chief Bush cheerleader Bill Kristol, Wall Street Journal, 1980 (right before the Reagan Administration)

“I think it’s important to put that comment [I said that ‘deficits don’t matter’] in context. I had, during my 10 years in the House, one of the most conservative voting records. I think my conservative credentials are well-established, in terms of fiscal policy. But this was in the early days of the administration. I was referring to the beginning of the Reagan administration, when he simultaneously cut taxes, reduced revenue and increased defense spending. He didn’t pay a political price for the deficit that resulted. It turned out to be sound policy, both in terms of the military buildup, as well as the change in tax policy and the reduction in rates and so forth. And there are circumstances under which just the deficit per se doesn’t have the kind of political consequences that we’re faced with now, obviously.” —Dick Cheney

“We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.” –Grover Norquist, 2003

“You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” –Bill Clinton during his presidency

“A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'”” —Mike Lofgren, recently retired Republican staff member on Capitol Hill

“[Dodd-Frank] establishes a mandatory 20 percent down payment to buy a house. So at a time when housing prices have dropped worse than the Great Depression, we’re now going to have a law that guarantees there’s no housing market for a generation?” –America’s New Presidential Hopeful, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, New(t) Gingrich

“It’s totally incorrect to say that Dodd-Frank came up with the 20 percent down payment standard. It just could not be further from the truth. So whoever says that is just misinformed.” –Ken Harney, a real estate columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

“By June 22, Gingrich himself had backed off, acknowledging that the 20 percent rule was just a proposal. And even the proposed rule would not make a large down payment mandatory.” —Politifact.com

“Community banks are 12 percent of the banks right now and 40 percent of the loans to small business. And they are being destroyed by Dodd-Frank.”

“Gingrich said that community banks “are being destroyed by Dodd-Frank.” But as a whole they are healthier than a year ago. No doubt the improvement in the economy has helped, but community banks also have benefited from a reduction in fees paid to the FDIC as a result of Dodd-Frank. From the point of view of community banks, Dodd-Frank is imperfect and still unfolding. But it has exempted community banks from many new regulations.” —Politifact.com

“But let’s be clear who put the fix in: the fix was put in by the federal government. And if you want to put people in jail, I will second what Michelle said: let’s look at Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and let’s look at the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” –Newt Gingrich

“Frank noted that he and Dodd, now retired and running the Motion Picture Association of America, were members of the minority party during that time. Gingrich was speaker from 1995 to 1999.” —U.S.A. Today

“Newt Gingrich made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac, according to two people familiar with the arrangement….. Gingrich said during the CNBC debate that he advised the troubled firm as a “historian.”…. Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with his work in 2006 say Gingrich was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.” —Bloomberg News

“He’s not a historian. Hire Sean Wilentz, hire Gordon Wood if you want a historian.” –George Will

“In terms of the actual corruption stuff, no, it’s not better it all. … They rearrange the chairs on the deck but the ship doesn’t change course.” —Jack “Abramoff scandal” Abramoff on Newt Gingrich

“The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.” –Newt Gingrich to CNN Money.

“In 2003, when France opposed going to war in Iraq, the U.S. took the next logical step: its House of Representatives’ cafeterias stopped serving French fries. They served “freedom fries” instead. Naturally, “French toast” became “freedom toast” as well. Republican Representatives Walter Jones and Bob Ney, who was the chairman of the House Administration Committee at the time and angered at “our so-called ally, France,” made it happen. The change didn’t have unanimous support. “Making Congress look even sillier than it sometimes looks would not be high on my priority list,” said Democratic Representative Barney Frank, clearly lacking in both patriotism and knowledge of France’s historic disdain for liberty. Well, the House fries ditched “freedom” in 2006 … around the same time Ney, who pleaded guilty to corruption charges, lost his.” –Time Magazine, Top 10 Dubious Name Changes

“When Joe Wilson spoke about the former administration, he was a bit more forthcoming. He pulled no punches in describing Cheney as the force behind the whole thing. Former Congressman Ney said basically the same thing, that Cheney was the “instigator” and the he “pushed for it,” but then he said: “Bush might have done it, but Cheney was surely there being the cheerleader.” —Daily Kos

“It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by The Wall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. ” —David Frum, “Axis of Evil” speechwriter for Bush

“The average annual cost to businesses under Obama is higher than under his predecessors, the Bloomberg review shows. The increase is estimated to total as little as $100 million or as much as $4.1 billion, or at most three one-hundredths of a percent of the total economy.” -Bloomberg News, “Obama Wrote 5% Fewer Rules Than Bush While Costing Business”

“[The European Central Bank video game will] grade you on the basis of a pure inflation targeting regime asymmetrically centered at 2 percent. I played a round in which inflation averaged -0.25% and we had a continent-wide depression in which output fell for twelve straight quarters. They gave me 2 stars out of four. I also ran a game in which inflation average 4.16% and we had zero quarters of recession. They gave me zero stars even though in the higher inflation scenario I was closer to the 2% target!” —Robert Yglesias

“There are many Republican misunderstandings about monetary policy, so it can be hard to know where to start.

-For a while, conservatives thought that just because the monetary base had expanded that inflation was inevitable, ignoring the point that simply having a large money base means nothing for inflation if money is not actually being exchanged in transactions.

-Conservatives also had a habit of interpreting high commodity prices during the summer as a sign of oncoming inflation. They haven’t updated their view to account for the current fall in commodity prices.

-In fact, America might benefit from a short period of inflation to make it easier for debts to be repaid, yet the thrust of the recent GOP attacks on the Federal Reserve is that inflation cannot be allowed to rise at all.

There are numerous conservative ways to support an expansionary monetary policy, currently the most fashionable one is to call for a Nominal GDP target. It is likely that any policy would likely be better than current conservative calls for higher interest rates or even in some cases, a gold standard.

Perhaps the most important reason conservative should support monetary expansion is that it can offset the contractionary effects of fiscal austerity. Yet this benefit gets ignored by many Republicans because…

Republicans have reversed past convictions and now claim fiscal austerity always works.” —David Frum

“We’ve been told again and again that the real motivation of the Tea Party is a multi-partisan movement to bring the debt and government under control. I’ve never believed this, partly because these people were never to be found under Bush. It was primarily a laundering device to disappear the Bush years, re-brand the GOP as a wholly different entity and thereby avoid the long wilderness that the catastrophes of the first decade of this century might have led them
into. Now we have some large data sets to review the reality. And the reality is that the Tea Party is the Christianist right-wing of the GOP.” —Andrew Sullivan

“Okay, Libya…. [glancing up….] President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. Just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, ‘Yes, I agreed. No, I didn’t agree,’ I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason– Nope, that’s a different one…. [looking up again….] I would have assessed the opposition differently…. It’s not a clear yes-no answer, because all of those things I think should have been assessed, that’s what I’m saying…. I got all this stuff twirling around in my head… I would have done a better job of determining who the opposition is. And I’m sure that our intelligence people had some of that information. Based upon who made up that opposition… might have caused me to make some different decisions about how we participated. Secondly, no I did not agree with Gadhafi killing his citizens. Absolutely not…. I would have supported many of the things that they did to help stop that… I would have gone about assessing the situation differently. It might have caused us to end up in the same place.” —Herman Cain, as confused and alienated to questions he should have seen coming as the Penn State coach.

“The liberal court found [Jesus] guilty of false offences and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12. His death reset the clock of time. Never before and not since has there ever been such a perfect conservative.” —Herman Cain

“Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems. Well before the crash of 2008, the U.S. economy was sending ominous warning signals. Median incomes were stagnating. Home prices rose beyond their rental values. Consumer indebtedness was soaring. Instead, conservatives preferred to focus on positive signals — job numbers, for example — to describe the Bush economy as “the greatest story never told.”

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

The same vulnerability to closed information systems exists on the liberal side of U.S. politics as well, of course. But the fact that my neighbor is blind in one eye is no excuse for blinding myself in both.”

Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be
distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets). Perhaps it’s because the most influential conservative voice on economic affairs is The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps it’s because conservatism disproportionately draws support from retirees who store their savings in traded financial assets. Perhaps it’s because a booming financial sector is uniquely generous with its campaign
contributions. Whatever the reason, the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.

But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require. Finance plays with other people’s money: financial disasters damage people and businesses who never participated in the fatal transaction. For that reason, financial firms are justly regulated in ways that other firms are not.
And yet nearly 80 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, influential conservatives — including The Wall Street Journal editorial board — argued that trillions of dollars of derivatives trading should be exempt from regulation.

Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget. During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with
the deficit.

Today, the positions are reversed. The big Republican idea of 2010 was Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget road map, which offered a serious plan to address Social Security and Medicare shortfalls. But what’s the most striking fact about Ryan’s budget plan is precisely that it is a budget plan — it’s a document concerned with government finance, not
the crisis in the economy. How will balancing the budget in the 2020s and 2030s, which is when the plan has most of its impact, create jobs and save homes in the here and now? This was the kind of problem that preoccupied the supply-siders of the 1980s and should again preoccupy Republicans today.

If Republicans reject Obama-style fiscal stimulus, what do they advocate instead? A monetarist might recommend more money creation, even at the risk of inflation: “quantitative easing,” as it’s called.

Yet leading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just
before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad. G. K. Chesterton observed that you should never take a fence down until you understand why it had been put up. We should remember why the immediate post-Depression generations created so many social-welfare programs. They were not motivated only — or even
primarily — by “compassion.” They were motivated as well by the desire for stability.

Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them. When people lost their jobs, their incomes did not drop by 100 percent, but by 30 percent or 40 percent: they could continue to pay rent, buy food and sustain society’s overall level of
demand for goods and services. State pensions created a segment of society whose primary incomes remained stable regardless of economic conditions. The growth of the higher-education sector and of health care had a similar effect.

This shift to a more welfare-oriented economy helps explain why business cycles in the second half of the 20th century were so much less volatile than they were in the 19th century. And fortunately enough, this shift put a floor under the economic collapse of 2008-09. Retirees who lost their savings had to cut back painfully. But at
least their Social Security checks continued to arrive. People who lost their jobs might lose their homes. But they continued to buy food and clothing. And the industries that sold those basic necessities continued to function — unlike in 1929-33, when the whole economy collapsed upon itself.

Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did. Conservatives should want a smaller welfare state
than liberals in order to uphold maximum feasible individual liberty and responsibility. But the conservative ideal is not the abolition of the modern welfare state, and we should be careful of speaking in ways that communicate a more radical social ideal than that which we actually uphold and intend.” —David Frum

“Direna had a camera in her hand and I had a microphone, and we were being hit. When I fell to the ground I said at one point, ‘I’m just covering this! I’m covering this!’ And the officer just said, ‘Come on, get up, get up,’ before pulling me up by my jacket.’…. The protesters came up to me right away and asked if I needed any medical assistance. They were actually very kind and helpful. It was the police officers who were very aggressive,” –Michelle Fields, reporter for Conservative website, Daily Caller, “Daily Caller reporter, videographer assaulted by NYPD during ‘Occupy’ protests”

“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. … Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.

The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers.

We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations, because it falls exclusively on the rich, and with the equal partition of intestate’s estates, constitutes the best agrarian law. In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the United States, pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture as we ought to do, he will pay not one cent.” —Thomas Jefferson