This blog has become All Red Plan all the time. It wasn’t always so as the old threads list to the right indicate. I found this non Red Plan comment on the Daily Dish today and checked out the entire post it was clipped from. If you’ve had enough caffeine, are concerned about the economy and have twenty minutes its worth a read:
The U.S economy is enormous and resilient, but it is not limitless. We managed to have a national debt that exceed 100% of GDP at the end of WWII, and still did pretty well thereafter. But of course, the entire globe was either bombed to rubble, in a primitive economic state or under the boot of communism, which we now know stifled real economic competition for us. Does that sound like the world we live in today?
Jim Manzi is evidently a “conservative” economist. He sure ain’t no Limbaugh because what he writes is complicated and, for a non-economist, hard to digest. However, what he says shows great intellectual honesty. The excerpt I posted is one of the things I was thinking last night when I began listening to President Obama’s second press conference. (In sixty days that already half as many as both Clinton and Bush Jr. had over the course of eight years.)
Many people have made the comment that the Red Plan will stimulate the Duluth economy – Ralph Doty for instance. Others say this is no time to spend so much. I’m an agnostic about either of these positions. I know a couple things. 1. The Red Plan has been oversold and based on impossible promises like the one that says future energy savings will halve its costs once they go into effect. To me such a claim is simply a lie. 2. People on fixed incomes who are soon likely to be hit by a terrible inflationary cycle are the ones paying the most for this because it is being financed by a “regressive” tax.
Any other claims about the Red Plan are as hard for me to predict as the predictions about the future national economy. The paragraph by Manzi quoted above suggests to me that we are headed somewhere we’ve never been before so that predictions are more a matter of faith than anything else. I’d say the same of the claims made in support of the Red Plan.
If my vote hadn’t been stolen from me I might have put more effort into figuring out the likely educational consequences of building the Red Plan. I have no doubt about the consequences of the theft of my democratic rights. The taxes I’ll pay for the Red Plan pale in comparison to that crime whether some court rules the theft to be legal or not.
