Via Digby, the teabagger view of chained CPI:
Digby calls it "gibberish." That's a pretty accurate take. If you read the whole interview -- well, I couldn't find a real thought in it, but maybe you can unearth something.
I'm not sure I agree with Digby's assessment -- she thinks people like Halvorson are too stupid to do that much harm, but if that idiot gets elected to Congress -- and we've already seen equally incoherent far-right candidates not only win primaries but win elections -- he's in a position to do some real damage.
The president’s proposal for chained CPI, which would reduce future Social Security benefits – what’s your view of that?
It’s classic government – it’s classic big government, so I think that it’s stealing from the American people…the government borrows money with no intentions of paying it back, and so how they – the way they deal with it is they allow the money to inflate…Without a gold standard or any real standard upon which – with just fiat money, the government is free to do that almost without any limitation. I say all that to say the CPI is just one more gimmick that the government has, a tool that they have at their disposal to sort of deal with…unintended consequences of big spending, deficit spending. That’s how they deal with it…It’s reprehensible…They’re perpetuating this establishment inertia, and it’s disgusting…
When you say “stealing from the American people,” are you referring to the Social Security program itself, or to proposal to change the CPI?
No. The effect that the changes to the CPI would have on the cost of living increases …It’s a one-off way to address the cost of living allowance increases in Social Security. So it’s an indirect way of addressing that problem which hurts so many people who are dependent on Social Security…
That’s what big government does. That’s why we’ve got to attack big government, that’s the enemy here. They’re trying to give all these things away, and they can’t afford it, and so they come back to try to address the unaffordability with things like that…
Digby calls it "gibberish." That's a pretty accurate take. If you read the whole interview -- well, I couldn't find a real thought in it, but maybe you can unearth something.
I'm not sure I agree with Digby's assessment -- she thinks people like Halvorson are too stupid to do that much harm, but if that idiot gets elected to Congress -- and we've already seen equally incoherent far-right candidates not only win primaries but win elections -- he's in a position to do some real damage.
2 comments:
People like Halvorson are seriously stupid, yes, but electing them is a sure way to continue the dysfunction of the federal government. Halvorson appears not to understand the role of government in the economy, or economics in general. This is pretty much the problem across the TeaBag world -- an ideological drive to object to government without a clear understanding of what government does. The potential for long-lasting harm not only to the US economy but to the world economy is very real.
The teabaggers don't understand what the government does or how it works, thanks to 30+ years of disinformation from the right, starting with Reagan.
In fact, they don't seem to understand much of how anything works.
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