Conspiracy

Conspiracy:

You know who's conspiring to wreck the country? Those darn Republicans:

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You'd also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You'd no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You'd also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help -- a tax policy that's already been tried -- but you'd do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?

(H/t: Dennis the Peasant, who replies: 'Coming from you, Steve, any thought is an experiment.')

Well, yes it does: except that I normally hear this line of thought from Ymar, and pointed in the other direction.

Note that both sets of plans strike a large number of people as likely to destroy the country. All we're disagreeing about is which side's ideas will ensure destruction.

Here's a more frightening idea than the possibility of a conspiracy: What if we're both right?