Republicans are all out of interesting economic ideas

Leftie rabble-rouser Harold Meyerson been on something of a roll lately in his column in the Washington Post. Last week there was his clever suggestion that maybe it was time to revive the House Un-American Activities Committee to look into American corporations’ lobbying against more rights for labor in China. (The argument being that such behavior directly harms the interests of American workers.)

Today there’s this. After listing a series of woes facing today’s workers, Meyerson writes:

To all of this, conservatives offer no remedy whatever save to make things worse. Employer-provided pensions collapsing? Let’s gut Social Security, too. Health insurance tottering? By all means, let’s preserve our private, for-profit system, which currently fails to cover 47 million of our fellow Americans. All income increases going only to the rich? Let’s switch to a flat tax (Rudy Giuliani’s most recent brainstorm), which further shifts the tax burden from the upwardly mobile rich to the downwardly-mobile everyone else.

You don’t have to endorse whatever Meyerson’s solutions to these problems might be to agree that the once full-of-ideas Republicans have become mostly brain-dead on social and economic issues. Ah, but at least they’ve got foreign and military policy all figured out!

Update: I realize I’m not being entirely fair here to Mitt Romney, whose Massachusetts health care plan is a real if inevitably flawed attempt to help the uninsured. But somehow I don’t think he’s going to be talking about that so much until the Republican primaries are over.

Update 2: Check out the fascinating comment below by Bruce from Las Vegas. My favorite part:

Alfred Maynard Keynes was debunked by Milton Friedman. The debated ended decades ago but apparently the news didn’t make it to the dinosaur media.

Yeah, we’ve definitely been covering up that whole Alfred Maynard Keynes debunking. He’s got me there. But I’m a friggin’ semi-Friedmanite! I’m one of those right-wing nutjobs who believes that 25 or 30 years ago the Republicans had many more compelling economics ideas than the Dems did! And I’m saying that now they have little to offer beyond the old cutting-taxes-raises-revenues canard.

Spain’s Prime Minister Warns Country Is in Danger of Being Shut Out of Markets

MADRID — Spain‘s prime minister warned Wednesday that the country faced the danger of being locked out of international markets as investors continued to fret about the future of the euro and Greece’s place in the 17-country eurozone.

“Right now there is a serious risk that (investors) will not lend us money or they will do so at an astronomical rate,” Mariano Rajoy told Spanish lawmakers.

Kevin Gulley

I feel bad for my Republican friends at this point. There is not a thing they can point to in the last 6 years with a feeling of pride. It has been a case of bad governance and will take them years to recover from.

Having dinner with a group of colleagues a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the moving of daylight savings time is clearly the highlight of this Republican administration. How sad it that?
Bruce in Las Vegas

Its hard NOT to think of TIME as just another left wing outlet. A ‘journalist’ quotes some nutroot lefty to avoid having to say it himself? That’s really pathetic. How cowardly do you have to be to hide behind some faceless Republican hating wacko on the web? You should remove the word Capitalist from your title to prevent further shame from coming to the word.

The GOP doesn’t have any ideas? Are we in a parallel universe? The last two economic recoveries were GOP led.

If it helps liberal losers to think that somehow the GOP is as bereft of ideas as the Democrat party is, knock yourselves out. It doesn’t say much about us but it does say alot about you.

Alfred Maynard Keynes was debunked by Milton Friedman. The debated ended decades ago but apparently the news didn’t make it to the dinosaur media.

Democrat ideas: Raise the minimum wage (40 yrs old), Extend Medicare to all Americans (1939), Unionize all workplaces by abolishing workers votes (1934), Abolishing Free Trade (1860s), Cap CEO pay (1962 US, 1914 USSR). Boy, those are some kinda ‘new’ ideas!