Rodger asks if people like Maya MacGuineas are ignorant or dishonest. I say dishonest, because Ms. MacGuineas would have to admit that the U.S. government can “print” all the dollars it needs, and therefore has no “debt crisis.” Nor is federal spending “unsustainable.”
Of course, she can use Plan B, which is to claim that austerity is our only protection against hyper-inflation. However she rarely bothers to use Plan B. She simply chants the magic words:
“Crisis-entitlements-unsustainable.”
“Crisis-entitlements-unsustainable.”
MacGuineas is just like the parasites in Washington whose livelihood is based on chanting in the echo chamber:
“Muslims-terrorism-global-threat.”
“Muslims-terrorism-global-threat.”
Here is one example (a rare one) in which Maya MacGuineas does use the hyper-inflation bogeyman…
“Printing large sums of money might offer a quick fix, but as international experience shows, it can lead to hyper-inflation.”
That’s all she says about inflation in a 15-page paper. The rest of the paper consists of chanting:
“Crisis-entitlements-unsustainable.”
“Crisis-entitlements-unsustainable.”
Maya MacGuineas claims that the USA has no austerity, since (according to her) deficit reduction is not austerity. Only a surplus is. She says that all FICA tax revenues should go to the thieves on Wall Street, since “Most beneficiaries get more out of Medicare and Social Security than they have paid into them.” (Speaking of Wall Street, MacGuineas’ husband, Robin Brooks, is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, with a reported base salary of $500,000.)
She says it would be useless to remove the $118,500-per-year income cap on paying FICA taxes, because it would “close only two-thirds of the 75-year shortfall and one-third of the shortfall in the 75th year.”
For MacGuineas, the only way out of our “crisis” is to privatize “entitlements” and to “broaden the tax base” (i.e. raise taxes on the lower classes).
The truth about money 