Brooks: Boehner’s spending freeze would be ‘insane,’ GOP is ‘stuck with Reagan.’
Brooks: Boehner’s spending freeze would be ‘insane,’ GOP is ‘stuck with Reagan.’
This morning on ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist David Brooks addressed House Minority Leader John Boehner’s recent call for a “freeze on government spending” in response to the quickly worsening economic conditions. Noting that the U.S. economy is now in a “recession/depression,” Brooks called Boehner’s proposal “insane,” and remarked that Republicans in Congress appear to be “thinking the way they thought in 1982″:
BROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane. But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only think that way again, that is just insane.
Watch it:
As The Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo explained, “A spending freeze would act as an ‘anti-stimulus,’ cutting spending precisely when it’s too low and the economy is moving too slowly.” Steve Benen adds, “The ongoing crisis is, by most measures, the economic equivalent of a 9/11-style terrorist attack. … It’s time the political world comes to terms with the fact that Republicans are guilty of a ‘pre-recession mindset.’“
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BROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem.
Which makes Gingrich’s job doubly hard. He has to convince voters he’s the best alternative in ‘12, using this self-defeating “government is the problem” line, while noting it largely happened on his party’s watch.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:49 amHas Supreme Leader Limbaugh commented on this blasphemy yet? Obviously, Brooks is not a conservative…purge him from the ranks!
March 8th, 2009 at 11:53 amMr. Brooks,
First, Ronald Reagan is dead.
Second, no matter how popular he was, Reagan was an idiot. His policies made no logical sense, and he help start the financial crisis we find ourselves in today with his “trickle down economics” theories.
Third, would you say this is more “insane” or less “insane” than supporting the invasion of a country that did not attack us (which you did quite a lot at the start of the Iraq War)?
March 8th, 2009 at 11:53 amYou really gotta love the party of NO. They have no new ideas, think that the same old shit is going change the economy and Raygun was the greatest thing since Jesus. Their answer is a spending freeze, cut taxes for the wealthy and let the banks go down in flames.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:54 amI just saw the G-man on MTP, and he’s playing coy, saying he has no plans to run, but who can tell, things may change.
Right.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:54 amBROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem
– - What GOP’ers conveniently leave out from Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address is “in this present crisis,” is what precedes his assertion that “government isn’t the solution yo your problems, government IS the problem.”
That gives it a whole different meaning. Imagine, GOP’ers cherry-picking.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:56 amThis is just too good! The rethuglican party looks worse and worse everyday! I wonder what they’ll say this week? They can not come up with anything new. No new ideas, just the same tired lines about tax cuts and Obama being a socialist. ROTFL!
March 8th, 2009 at 11:59 amNotice how Republican politicians aren’t talking about family values anymore. The biggest value in a family is a paycheck. A spending freeze would bring this country to a complete halt. What are these guys smoking? Oh, forgot. They’re the party of family values and not much else.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:01 pmOf course it is insane to propose a spending freeze at this time. And, of course, it is the Republican leadership that is insane. Some things never change.
The rapid rate of increase in unemployment to 8.1% already suggests that there is a strong likelihood that a second stimulus package will be necessary rather than the insane freeze the GOP is calling for.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:04 pmHeard McCain came out yesterday and said, we should not give anymore money to failing banks or the auto industry. McCain say’s, if they can’t make it, let them go under. Lets just throw all those people out of work, and everything will be alright.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:11 pmFile this response under no duh. No, wait, coming from a conservative file it under maybe clapping will save Tinkerbell.
Reagan had only one redeeming quality as President…he had experience in learning his lines quickly and doing what the director said.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:13 pmI’ll give Reagan his do. He did pretty well for a two bit “B” grade actor. Its just to bad he wrecked the country in the process.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:16 pmThe problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. asus M2400 laptop batteries
March 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pmWho cares what this man says. He complained about Michelle Obama’s dress with sleeves out, how petty. Can’t wait for the “I’m sorry Rush”. The GOPs head is up Rush’s butt anyways. Like what you smell? LOL
March 8th, 2009 at 12:22 pmGovernment turns out to be the only solution to the problems created by treating government as the problem.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:35 pmThere was a time when I listened to what this man said. It was right after he replaced paul gigot on the Jim Lerher Newshour. Then it dawned on me that he wasn’t reasonable, just reasonable sounded when compared to gigot.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:39 pmGive credit where it’s due. Brooks is absolutely right on this. More conservatives need to drag their ignorant party into the reality-based community.
http://www.pufferfishblog.com/
March 8th, 2009 at 12:44 pmHow long before David has to apologize to Rush? ;^)
March 8th, 2009 at 1:06 pmThe repugs remain blind that Reagan’s administration ushered in the beginning of this multi-faceted disaster we are suffering today.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:09 pmDemocrats always have to clean up repugnican errors, and this one is a doozy!
David Brooks remarked on Michelle Obama’s choice of dress style??!!
March 8th, 2009 at 1:11 pmHe thinks she is flaunting her toned arms.
OMG.
Although she probably has better biceps than he does.
Face the Nation interviewed Orszag and followed up with Boehner.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:16 pmDr. Orszag graduated summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University and obtained an
M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar.
Boehner is a pandering politician whom I suspect can’t balance his checkbook.
The government is the driver of a car. When all the systems are goging smoothly, the car has high efficiency and goes far on a gallon of gas ($). When it is NOT running smoothly, its gas mileage suffers, and as we all know, one of the worst gas sucking things you can do in a car is ACCELERATE at high demand ($$$) to get up to speed onto the highway. Your gas mileage drops precipitously ($$$$$$$) as your acceleration increases. But, yet when you are up to highway speed, you are back to using gas frugally/efficiently.($$)
Our economy was taken off the road and put on a mountain, without a road over the last 8 years. In fact, the policies of the bush administration caused us to awaken every hibernating bear for miles around, and allowed the gas station to put ifferior tires and products on our car at the last visit, due to lowered corporate regulations. This has set a stage for our car to now be traveling up hill, on mountainous terrain, with inferior tires, etc, and a pack of wild hungry , angry, bears chasing us.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:22 pmAnd the REpublitroids wish to not have the government spend any more money to get us out of the mess they got us into. I say, throw them from the car and let the bears get a feeding.
Perry logan Says:
Government turns out to be the only solution to the problems created by treating government as the problem.
Perry, I just looked it up.
That IS the very definition of IRONY.
Who woulda thought Raygun was so prescient. Go figure.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:26 pmHow Boehner could want a spending freeze is beyond me. Things are terrible economically in Ohio. He must not get home much.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pmHah. Put that together with Newt’s effectively calling El Rushbo “irrational,” & RNC Chair Michael Steele calling the Republican party “an elephant mired in its own muck” (New York Times today), & you have a party whose own leaders are calling each other “irrational,” “insane,” and full of it.
That would pretty much be my assessment, too.
The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com
March 8th, 2009 at 1:57 pmA lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane.
No David, this is EXACTLY what the republicans want to do.
They are willing to sacrifice the economic well-being of the United States of America and drive the entire world into a depression in order to get back into power.
Republicans are SELFISH BASTARDS!
March 8th, 2009 at 2:23 pmFor once, I agree with Brooks.
I’m sure he’ll say something foolish in the near future, especially if Boss Limbaugh come down hard on the dissenters in the GOP.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:26 pmWayne A. Schneider Says:
First, Ronald Reagan is dead.
_________
So is the GOOP.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:09 pmHey give the repubs a break. They’ve come quite a ways just in the last 8 years.
*) they’ve turned the Clinton boom into a bust which has already taken the market back to the 1st Clinton term
*) They’ve taken a government which was running at a surplus and shown it to be evil by changing the surplus to the largest deficit in history.
*) They’ve learned Enron accounting techniques allowing them to take the invasions of Iran and Afghanistan off the books.
*) They’ve managed to redefine “war” to include anything they don’t like.
*) Despite years of saying the economy is strong and there was no economic slowdown, they’ve finally admitted that there is a recession. Somehow, this instantaneously acted on all repubs on Jan 20. I can’t figure out why.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:13 pmTelling the government to freeze spending as we sink into depression is like saving your parachute for the second time you jump out of an airplane.
March 8th, 2009 at 6:28 pmBoehner is a bonehead! What a bunch of boneheads voted for him.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:02 pmtranslation: when government spending is for average folks, Brooks agrees with Rush. When government is to clean up epic disaster of trust fund babies gone wild and make sure they get their bonuses and parties comped on time, government spending is good.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:02 pm“(6)Badmoodman Says:
BROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem
- – What GOP’ers conveniently leave out from Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address is “in this present crisis,” is what precedes his assertion that “government isn’t the solution yo your problems, government IS the problem.”
That gives it a whole different meaning. Imagine, GOP’ers cherry-picking.”
It took me a second, but I then realized that it must have been the Iranian hostage situation to which Reagan was referring, as “in this present crisis,” which the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter had been incapable of resolving, no matter what his administration tried.
Shortly after Reagan made this statement in his inaugural address the Iranian government (Ayatollah Khomeini) released the hostages.
This statement by Reagan in his inaugural address and the almost immediate release of the hostages leads me to believe that the Republicans DID cut a deal with the Ayatollah, going behind the back of the Carter administration, undercutting their efforts to get the hostages released, prolonging the time the hostages were held, and eventually leading to the Iran/Contra scandal.
In other words, the culture of corruption and demonic/demented political strategies Republicans used the Iranian hostage situation to enhance their chances of beating the Democrats in 1980 by negotiating behind the scenes with the people holding our citizens hostage over in Iran…to try to block the Iranians from working out a deal with the Carter administration.
Thus, Reagan’s “veiled” statement in his inaugural address and the subsequent release of the hostages shortly after Reagan had been sworn in (within hours). Coincidence? Hardly. Typical corrupt conservative Republican anti-American machinations? Definitely. Can our liberal democracy stand much more of this conservative Republican madness? Could any country?
March 8th, 2009 at 7:57 pmIt is not the Republican Party which believes in limited government. We have two major parties which both love big government. Long before there was a Republican party, Thomas Jefferson said, “That government which governs least governs best.” Don’t give the Republicans credit they don’t deserve.
It is amazing to hear the Republicans labelled “corrupt” when Democrats were already so corrupt that during the Revolutionary War, they went for a deal that was later written into the Constitution. Basically it was for every five slaves a Democrat owned, he would get three extra votes. When the first Republican president was elected, Democrats appointed their own Democrat as president, Jefferson Davis, and started a civil war, not over economic philosophies or slavery, so much as over outrage that an upstart political party could bump them out of the White House. During that war, Democratic bigwigs maintained a policy to create extermination camps in the South to kill off captured Republicans and abolitionists. My great grandfather was an abolitionist captured and put in one of those camps. Like you would expect of any death camp, there were guard dogs, but not like you’d expect, these dogs were there to prevent escape, but to protect the camp’s rats from being eaten by the prisoners. My great grandfather and his friends killed and ate the guard dog and then ate the rats. The Democratic party has had over two centuries in which to grow and fester in corruption. The Republicans lag way behind.
When the Florida “hanging chads” issue started I told everyone this meant a Democratic congress because their push to eliminate the physical evidence of voting meant the Democrats had found a way to hack electronic voting machines. That was when our economy was set up by a Democratic congress to tank, not during a Republican watch. Reaganomics and a strong economy had meant that more and more people voted Republican. Democrats get more votes when the economy is bad and people are hurting.
Democrats are sick and tired of Reagan prosperity and want to make sure this time it never happens again. First the Democrats shoot our economy in the leg and then give it a rubber crutch, the stimulus package, which contains protectionist provisions and govenment programs like those that prolonged the 1930’s depression for as long as the Democrats could keep in power.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:07 pmWill someone please explain the logic of spending more money in weeks than has been spent in the history of the country to rid ourselves of a problem which has its origins in spending too much.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:24 amThe logic is basically this. The economy can be broken up into 4 basic sectors:
· Consumers, the general public,
· Industry, also know as business,
· Government
· Net imports-to-exports
Now should everyone knows that we have been running a huge trade deficits with most of our foreign trading partners for the last 20-30 years, so that sector of the economy is a negative value on our economy overall.
Consumers are not spending because there is very little credit, their wages have gone down and the uncertainty of their future employment. These factors have caused consumer spending to plummet like a ball falling off the table; so that is a negative on our economy
Industry is facing the same problems as consumers with the added pressure of falling sales.
So now that just leaves the Government. It has been pointed out earlier on this thread that the Republicans turned the economic surplus into the largest deficit in history. Deficits are not always a bad thing for the government to have, but when you run up a deficit buying things that go boom and then they are gone causes problems. Spending on things that will last 20, 30, 40 or 70 years and we will get value out of them is a bad thing. The Government must spend and spend a lot of to keep the negative downturn manageable and eventually Industry and Consumers will start to spend money again, but if sales continue to fall and more people lose their jobs the economic turn-around could be a time coming.
So from a logical stand-point the Government is the only sector in the economy that spend the money to help the downturn become less devastating and lay the ground-work for a speedy recovery once the other sectors start spending again.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:14 amDid you guys freeze spending when you republicans were spending billions of dollars in iraq with no reason, now it is our turn and we are spending to save this nation.
March 9th, 2009 at 2:18 amWhy does everyone forget that Reagan increased taxes in 1982?
March 9th, 2009 at 2:35 amI don’t even know where to begin. “Reagan was an Idiot.” who saved the U.S. from the policies of a bigger idiot- Carter. No, you’d never believe that, he was asleep for eight years. Bush sat in his treehouse reading superfudge while he caused Hurricane Katrina. Yes, he caused hurrican Katrina because he didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty. OOH and my favorite that he planted Bombs in the World Trade Center and Caused it to collapse. Don’t get me started on Iraq it’s the same a viet nam except that 50,000 americans died and we weren’t allowed to win. Hell, it’s too bad you guys couldn’t have stopped us from ousting Hitler, of course I imagine Darfur will be safe from our meddling. The truth is you’re all brainwashed by the media and the Union run-public education. I remember sitting in my education classes and my professors telling me that if I don’t vote Democrat that that we’ll never make any money and our jobs will be harder. Well 75,000 a year and summers off, I admit it’s not as good as turning a bolt for 30-75 dollars an hour for as a United Steel Worker- oh wait, they’re in trouble aren’t they? But, who really cares anyway, half of you swear by your toyota and would never buy an American car anyway. I could sit around and refute ever single thing you have all said, but all I’ve done is pissed you off and brainwashed people can’t be helped anyway.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:34 amLet me start by stating that I am shocked by Brooks’ statement about the GOP being insane in their thinking because all he generally writes about is his dislike for Obama and how Obama is dragging us down economically. On the other hand, Christopher Buckley or Michael Smerconish [sp?], both GOP journalists, have had far more laudatory evaluations of Obama’s handling of the economy.
As I remember it, when Reagan was in power in the 80s, he was HORRIBLE for America [except for the wealthy], because that was when the rich started getting even more excessively richer with his decision that ‘TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS’ would help all Americans. However, that is when the middle class started its economic decline which caused us to lose financial ground to the point of stagnation [even if we managed to get a raise at work, it wasn't even enough to keep ahead of any cost of living increases].
Moreover, with each successive congress from Reagan’s time forward continually destroying ALL financial regulations [remember during the 2008 GE when McCain stated, "I voted with W over 90% of the time on DE-regulation"- he was so PROUD of that], we, the middle class didn’t stand a chance to grow economically since we could barely manage with the income we tried to make go further and further, all the while watching the upper crust getting wealthier to the point of ’so much excess’ it would cause one [who was/is middle class] to question where they went so terribly wrong in life since they were only ‘treading water’ financially.
The GOP are insane and should be put in their place permanently. They didn’t give the Dems a voice over the last 8 years, so the Dems need to give them that same teeatment particularly in regards to their so-called Budget – the Road to Recovery!
What a joke they have become from M. Steele to M. Bachmann and Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and Gingrich. They’re all just like Palin – no thought or ideas, just ‘memorization of cliches and old talking points’. JOKES just aren’t going to work with the American public anymore – we are no longer in a laughing mood!
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm