"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan said at the 1988 Republican convention, misquoting John Adams. The real quote was "Facts are stubborn things."
In the wake of last week’s disappointing jobs numbers, Republicans are itching to blame the Obama administration for not doing enough. Frothing and screaming about the rise of socialism after Obamacare, they vowed a return to austerity, slashing post-stimulus government spending, and declaring Obama's Jobs Bill dead on arrival in Congress.
This is a tactic called "starving the beast," in which Republicans, following Ronald Reagan, cynically and repeatedly cut taxes, claiming that they want to create jobs to get us out of this recession, but in fact create the government dysfunction that they then use as proof that government doesn’t work.
The only problem: cutting government has never gotten us out of a recession. Basic Keynesian theory—that is, the theory that has guided U.S. economic policy since the Great Depression—calls for an INCREASE of spending during a recession (See: every other recovery since 1945). Government spending is crucial during periods of low employment, because government spending creates jobs. Wonder why we have a jobs crisis? Economist Paul Krugman gleefully dismantles the GOP’s premise with these charts:
Contrast the first chart, which shows a huge dip in federal spending right in the middle of our prolonged recession, with the second, which shows spending rising to combat other post-1945 recessions. There’s your jobs crisis.
What’s so cynical about Republican ideology is that they claim to want to cut spending to reduce the deficit. Since when? In a particularly insightful article at Business Insider, Joe Wiesenthalnotes that “Republicans were pro-deficit, and pro-entitlement expansion under Bush and Reagan. Deficit cutting only became part of the party's ideology under Obama.” Bush casually and dramatically increased government spending in the midst of an economic boom without paying for it, creating much of the deficit that the GOP now blames on Obama. That’s fiscal irresponsibility.
We’re continuing to pay the price now for Reagan’s disproven ideology. Cutting taxes and government spending makes a recession worse. It also makes our deficits worse. Facts are stupid things, they’re just getting in the way of the Republican Congress’ first priority: defeating Obama.
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