Posted in Broken Promises, Election 2012, Equality, Family, Jobs & The Economy, Labor Unions, Tea Party, The Economy, The Numbers Game, Those Kooky Conservatives!, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Politics

The Left Triumphant!

   May 7, 2012

In Europe, at least.  France has a new Socialist President, François Hollande.  While the Euro traded lower this morning (no surprise), the opposition in Germany, both politically and to the ongoing austerity pact with France, was energized.

Ms. Merkel’s political opponents, though, seemed cheered. Sigmar Gabriel, head of the opposition Social Democrats, said on Monday that the result in France showed that “the politics of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy led Europe deeper into crisis.”

The victory for Mr. Hollande will “not only change France, but finally help Europe to go in another direction,” he said.

In effect, Mr. Hollande’s commitment to negotiating a new pact for the battered euro zone seemed to challenge Mrs. Merkel’s dominance of the debate, projecting France as the vaunted champion of a wider movement of people no longer prepared to go along with threats to cherished living standards.

“Austerity need not be Europe’s fate,” Mr. Hollande declared after his victory was announced.

Now, in Wisconsin, we have the opportunity to make the same move away from the fiscal austerity of Governor Walker to a real pro-growth agenda which will create good, middle-class jobs for our citizens.  Austerity need not be Wisconsin’s fate, either!

Wisconsin can no longer afford Walker’s brand phony economic “realism.”  Haven’t we learned yet?

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3 thoughts on “The Left Triumphant!”

  1. Our parents have instituted this austerity program simply because they have run out of money. Imagine that! They have taken away our credit cards to curb our spending. Just who do they think they are? We will not allow them to do that. We need to stand together. So text all of your friends and tell them to vote for new parents next month. We all know kids who have cool parents that party with them and let them do anything they want. Those are the kind of parents we all should have. So vote next month for cool parents and end this austerity!

    1. Yes, and if sovereign nations were the same as your checking account, you might be right. But of course, you are epically wrong. Again.

      Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

      This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

      First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

      Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

      This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

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