Pirate's Cove

If it’s a day ending in a “y”, it must be a day where an inside the beltway mentality liberal is making an absurd argument, casting blame, naming problems, but, unable to provide any rationale for his/her solutions. Over at Powerline, Paul eviscerates Excitable Matthew Yglesias over Matty’s ridiculous “Summer of Fear” opinion piece in the Washington Post. Not to be outdone, Paul Krugman provides his own deranged op-ed piece in the NY Times

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

So, what is the the answer? If you guessed some tax increases, you would be correct. He blames Republicans and “centrist” Democrats for worrying more about the deficit (which used to be bad in Paul’s World when Bush was president and the deficit was a fraction of what it is today) than about the nation’s infrastructure and teacher’s high salaries. Say, Paul, you make well over $250K a year: are you sending yearly taxes equal to what you would have paid while Clinton was president, since that is what you want all “the rich” to pay?

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

We ranted about runaway government spending under Bush, too, hence his overall low approval rating. Perhaps if your Chump Messiah and his crew, along with the Democrat Congress Critters (who’s been in charge of Congress since 2007?) had a clue as to the way the economy worked, they wouldn’t have put in place policies and legislation, with potential legislation and policies floating over Washington as threats, that makes companies from tiny to mega-huge hold off on increasing its workforce. If people were working, they would be spending, more tax money would hit the local and state coffers, and they wouldn’t have to worry about turning asphalt roads into gravel roads.

The rest is what you would expect, left wing rants with idiotic solutions based on late night Harvard bull sessions rather than Reality Land, ending with

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

See? It’s your fault, Conservatives and TEA Partiers, that government, which is spending more money than ever, creating monster sized deficits, harming the solvency of future generations, is so inept that it can’t keep the street lights lit. I don’t really have to mention that it’s actually idiots like Krugman, who believes that it is the government which drives wealth creation, rather than the private sector, do I?

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU