Low hanging fruit.
Fail:David Plouffe.
Fill stop right there. Meanwhile, Obama’s inner populist doesn’t ring true for me at all. But, Willard doesn’t even have an inner populist. This leads to the coding crunch in the above call and response videos.
If Romney squeaks by and also is gifted with slim Republican majorities in the Congress, then I would predict the filibuster would be ejected. Romney would be under a ton of pressure to instantly deliver the country to the gateway of the Randian/Vatican utopia.
Ezra Klein: The Keynesian case for Romney
But Romney, though he often buys into that sort of nonsense while criticizing Obama, knows better. Time magazine asked him about cutting spending in 2013. “If you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent,” Romney said. “That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.” You couldn’t have gotten a clearer definition of Keynesian budgeting from Obama.
Will Romney, if elected, flip flop flip back into his natural state of easefulness: technocratic Reagan wannabee? In which case, his policy venture strikes me as revolving around tax and regulation mitigation, and, purchasing more toys for the military. …kind of exactly like Reagan. With such a thrust out of the gate, like Reagan, he could then ride the business cycle to both more concentration of wealth and tilting of the table toward the warmer climes, and, maybe an unemployment rate of 6-7%.
The deficit would skyrocket. Many more children would be thrust into poverty. He’d have to avoid a regional war ‘about’ Iran. And, an activist Congress could cast all manner of politically harmful legislative paper across his desk. Still, Ezra Klein considers, albeit late in the game, the obvious prospective Romney tilt away from a doctrinaire, kamikaze, mission.
(For normal, old school, capitalists oriented to the quaint structure of the consumer economy, it still doesn’t make much sense to vote for Romney–if the main goal is too grow one’s pile of assets should same be rooted in consumption of goods and services. On the other hand, new fangled speculators and rent seekers and Galtian innovators may laugh at such stocks and bonds avatism.)
(6/5 Update Ezra Klein More on whether Romney is the Keynesian choice)
Now, let’s rank those scenarios by their probability of occurring, at least according to the InTrade market’s betting estimates:
1) Obama and a divided Congress.
2) Romney and a Republican Congress;
3) Romney and a divided Congress;
4) Obama and a Democratic Congress;
The least Keynesian outcome is suddenly the most likely outcome. The most Keynesian outcome is the least likely outcome. But Romney and a Republican Congress — the second most Keynesian outcome — remains the second-most likely outcome.
The wild card remains the utopian fervor of the teaparty members of the House of Representatives. In the past, this wasn’t a factor at such times when a newly minted Republican President made the turn toward the Keynesian. This turn has always happened, and it could be cast as the inevitable consequence of the GOP having reached their usual ne plus ultra objective: a return to power.
But the teaparty wish is for a permanent rearrangement of the political economy and Constitutional order. This fantasy, even if it can be made to jibe with the rightward ‘Galtian’ plutocratic fantasy of sustaining its own defense of privilege and hyper-wealth, collides with the tried-and-true and old fashioned Republican muddling along with Keynesian strokes, paying off donors, and, doing nothing about social issues.
(After all, you need those social issues to remain unresolved so that resentment, etc.. never wanes.)
Starting with Richard Nixon, every Republican president has left the dollar lower, the federal budget deficit higher, the American trade position weaker, and the U.S. manufacturing work force smaller than when he took office. James Fallows 2005
