Perry takes aim at Big Government, shoots economy in the face. 

The bulk of Republican proposals to kick-start the economy seem to revolve around dismantling the federal government.  Mitt Romney said Tuesday he’ll cut the corporate income tax to 25 percent, curtail labor unions, launch new free trade agreements, roll back all Obama-era regulations and cut non-defense discretionary spending by 5 percent. He will gut health care reform and somehow go after China for currency manipulation. 

            This, then, will get us those 22 million jobs we need? The Atlantic weighed in with, “As odd as it may seem, Romney appears to believe that one way to create jobs is to eliminate them.”

            Ron Paul, when asked what government agencies he would eliminate, suggested the question would be better phrased to ask which ones he wouldn’t.

            In the La-La Land of the conservative thought bubble, it’s all about killing the golden goose.  I refer to the goose that bails out states, industries and disaster areas.  The goose that hires so many in poor, rural areas through subsidized education, health and social safety programs.  The goose that invests in cancer-beating basic research.  The goose that throws money at defense contractors as if they were gander from heaven.  The goose that invented corporate welfare.  The goose that extended unemployment insurance for the longest term ever for the most people ever.  The goose that pays grandpa’s rent when the company for which he worked for 35 years forget to give him a pension.  That goose.

            Even the hated U.S. Postal Service is part of the goose.  Today it contemplates winding down or declaring insolvency—this week its director threatens to throw 100,000 people out of work next year.

            Michele Bachmann wants to reduce government “to its original size.”  Sometimes stupid is as stupid talks.  I hear pundits tell us that this is all just for show, just for the diehards, and that as soon as the right-wing primaries are over it will be time for talking sense.  Do you believe that?

            George Stephanopoulos writes for ABC News that:

Perry wrote in his book “Fed Up”  — that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” a “failure,” “something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now,” and one of many New Deal programs that have “never died, and like a bad disease, they have spread.”  

I believe Perry wrote those things well before the primary season began.

      The nonsense is almost random.  We could line up a bunch of I-H8-Big Guv quotes and a random list of conservative front runners and also-rans and it could be anyone of ‘em sayin’ any one of 'em.

            Quick, who said?

…Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it’s slavery. We become slaves to government.”

(Rick, not Michele.) And really.  Pharaoh?  The Department of Outlandish Remarks Department is getting pretty redundant around here.

Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone?

Clearly, Republicans are refracting enough undifferentiated anger to power all of Houston for at least a year.  And they’re trying to direct all that anger at the one entity that best represents American political aspirations, even if it all too often honors them in the breach--and has since its inception.  I don’t know about you, but I am not ready to throw in my lot with Texas, with all it’s voodoo job counts based on government job growth linked to population increases, with its crap-on-crap textbooks, degraded environment and ambivalence about “intelligent design.”  No, Texas, you can have all that. 

            They say they want to kill the golden goose but they don’t even want that.  They want instead for its largesse to accrue exclusively to a kind of Blackwater/Xe blood-siphoning that redirects government spending to favored corporations—just like in Texas!  And then, beleaguered citizens, they want to keep the whole defense behemoth in place to protect private global energy companies with the kind of adventurism that artificially boosts rural employment through military service while killing our sons and daughters because—TADA!—there are no other job options.

            Our deeply flawed system of governance reveals us to be but adolescents in the long-term quest for self-determination. In Norway, they structured their oil wealth so that they would grow a $500 billion endowment—$100,000 for every man, woman and child in that nation.  And no one ever touches that corpus.  How long do you think that would last here?  And then they have the audacity to continue to tax at European social democracy levels.  The result?  A republic that mostly works.  Unlike, well, unlike any country where a significant, mouthy plurality wants to rip its social fabric to shreds in order to sit around the neighborhood oil drum and sew homemade state flags.  If this is the advent of state’s rights democracy, frankly, you can have it.  And, oh yeah, from the afterthought department:  try to squeeze more than a couple million jobs out of the whole deal over the next four years if you are really, really lucky.