...to what problems are Pawlenty’s problems the answer?
There’s no inflation to be snuffed, and productivity is improving smartly: up 4.2% in manufacturing in the first quarter of 2011.
What we do suffer from are enormous levels of public and private debt, and lagging domestic demand for goods and services. Tight money will only add to the burden of public and private debt. Nor will a reduction in income taxes for the upper brackets help much with the demand problem: as we saw in the Bush years, rich people use extra income to buy additional capital assets. That’s just what the doctor ordered in the under-invested late 1970s and early 1980s. In the post-1995 era, however, the policy translates into asset bubbles.
Ezra Klein's take is even harsher:
This plan isn’t optimistic. It isn’t a bit vague. It’s a joke. And I don’t know which is worse: The thought that Pawlenty knows that and went forward with this pandering, fantasy-based proposal anyway, or the thought that he doesn’t know it, and he really thinks this could work.
I used to think the Republican Party didn't have a candidate to face President Obama in 2012. Then I realized they haven't had a good candidate in decades. And now I think I know why: they don't have any ideas, either.
Today's GOP is intellectually bankrupt.
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