{"id":34391,"date":"2013-03-04T10:12:19","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T14:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34391"},"modified":"2013-03-04T10:21:01","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T14:21:01","slug":"dingus-sequester-is-kennedys-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34391","title":{"rendered":"Dingus: Sequester is Kennedy’s fault"},"content":{"rendered":"

The standards for having an opinion piece in the Washington Post<\/a> must’ve been lower3ed considerably, evidenced by the bit written today by Robert Samuelson who blames Kennedy’s 1964 tax cut for today’s sequester problem;<\/p>\n

It was a disaster.<\/p>\n

High inflation was the first shock. An initial boom (by 1969, unemployment was 3.5 percent) spawned a wage-price spiral. With government seeming to guarantee 4 percent unemployment, workers and businesses had little reason to restrain wages and prices. In 1960, inflation was 1 percent; by 1980, it was 13 percent. The economy became less stable. From 1969 to 1982, there were four recessions, as the Federal Reserve alternated between trying to push unemployment down and prevent inflation from going up. Only in the early 1980s did the Fed, under Paul Volcker and with Ronald Reagan\u2019s support, crush inflationary psychology. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Since Kennedy\u2019s tax cut passed in 1964 \u2014 after his assassination \u2014 there have been 43 budget deficits and only five surpluses (1969, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001). Even the surpluses reflected luck more than policy. The last four resulted mostly from the 1990s economic boom, boosting tax revenue, and the end of the Cold War, lowering military spending. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nice try. But ya know what else happened in 1964? Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the introduction of combat troops to Vietnam because of the manufactured Gulf of Tonkin incident. In January 1969, the lame duck Congress voted to dip into the Social Security trust fund to pay for the massive spending that welfare and the war were eating up. In 1971, Richard Nixon launched the Wage & Price freeze. In 1979, Jimmy Carter founded the Education and Energy Departments. If you’re looking for reasons to blame for federal deficits, I wouldn’t look at cutting taxes – I’d look at government spending instead and resolute adherence to liberal economic policies that just don’t work.<\/p>\n

But, then the Washington Post is trying to support the President’s policy of raising taxes, despite the fact that tax cuts result in increased revenue – evidenced most recently by the Bush tax cuts in the 2000s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The standards for having an opinion piece in the Washington Post must’ve been lower3ed considerably, evidenced … Dingus: Sequester is Kennedy’s fault<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}