roachboy

i think the line about krugman sums up the problem with this and almost every other "discussion"...you--and you are hardly alone in this---cannot cross out of your own frame of reference on socio-economic questions---and you've only got one. so when it comes down to it and you're confronted with viewpoints outside your terms, all you can do is try to find an excuse to dismiss it on the one hand, and repeat your starting point on the other. so there's really only one discussion that you want, and that is a discussion in which everyone agrees politically and conceptually, so that the discussion is really a matter of local adjustments.

it's not a particularly democratic approach. but whatever.

i've actually bothered to work out the basic tenants of supply-side hoodoo. i didn't do it voluntarily, but i did it. if i thought that theoretically it made sense, we could have a different kind of conversation--but it doesn't make sense logically and even if it was logically consistent the gap between predicted and actual outcomes in those instances where its been implemented are self-evident.

for example, the "innovation" you grovel at the feet of innovated the american-based manufacturing base out of the united states. that "innovation" benefitted shareholders. in conservative-land, that is ethical. in the actual world, it is an act of class warfare.i do not think class war an effective way to address unemployment. apparently you do.

this is a structural problem in the american economy produced, enabled and screened by supply-side monetarist hoodoo. if you know anything about the overall history of western capitalism since the early 1970s, there's no avoiding this.

for the record, i orient myself as someone who's spent way too long studying the history of the capitalist form of production since world war 2.


i think there's something wrong, something profoundly wrong, with an ideological context in which people look around them and see real problems, deep problems and connect them empirically and logically to a particular worldview--neoliberalism, the washington consensus, supply side, whatever---and not bring that worldview into fundamental question. but that's our situation in the states. i think it's perhaps an educational issue. i hope it's not. i hope it's something else. laziness maybe. something i haven't thought of. who knows.

====

edit:

dogzilla---so you know, the position i am arguing from is not merely the opposite of yours.
i don't think taxes are the central problem.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite