The Absurdity of Conservative Discourse

Missouri state treasurer Sarah Steelman, announcing her intentions to run for the Senate in 2012, made the following comment,

""We need jobs - urgently. We need to balance the budget - urgently," she said. "We have to fight if we're going to save this country for our kids and grandkids. There is no time to wait."

On the surface, this reads like a sensible soundbite. But what is she really saying? Most respectable economists agree that to stimulate the economy, we probably need another stimulus package -- though most lose the will to actually advocate for what they believe. In other words, the government has to spend a chunk of money to stimulate consumption and business investment (particularly as corporations that just had their most profitable quarter ever still refuse to hire workers). So a stimulus costs money and undermines the ability to balance the budget. Further, they want to balance the budget but make the Bush tax cuts permanent, costing the government trillions of dollars in lost revenue and further exacerbating the growing inequality between rich and poor.

To put it more simply, statement one and two stand in stark contradiction to one another. If you want to do the first, the second becomes a longer term goal. If you want to do the second, you can do little to work toward the first. Yet this sort of tautology tends to work with the American people because they don't have a basic understanding of economics. They simultaneously want  the government to intervene and hate when it does. They want lower taxes and have somehow lost faith in the progressive tax system that actually works toward the very liberty they are so inured to. And they blame the government for not fixing problems without giving them the resources to actually intervene. Thus Republicans might continue to win office working against the interests of everyone except their corporate sponsors.