I'm swiping a line from Firesign Theatre (originally, "Eveyrhing you know is wrong") to define Republicans by their now habitual manner of making up stuff when the facts clearly contradict their fantasies. The latest such busted myth came courtesy of a former Federal Reserve vice president, debunking that hard-held GOP meme about the "failed Obama recovery." With a hat tip to Crooksandliars.com:
Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former Fed vice president, thoroughly debunked the GOP's claims on Tuesday in aWall Street Journal op-ed titled "The GOP Myth of 'Job-Killing' Spending." Blinder writes:
The generic conservative view that government is "too big" in some abstract sense leads to a strong predisposition against spending. OK. But the question remains: How can the government destroy jobs by either hiring people directly or buying things from private companies? For example, how is it that public purchases of computers destroy jobs but private purchases of computers create them?
Blinder easily knocks down claims that the 2009 federal stimulus—roughly $600 billion in spending and $200 billion in tax cuts—failed to create jobs, pointing to Congressional Budget Office data that shows the net job gain was at least 1.3 million and perhaps as high as 3.3 million. What's more, Blinder debunks the idea that the federal deficit and the uncertainty that comes with it has caused companies to scale back business investments, which in turn impacts hiring and economic growth. Except such investment soared in the past year, increasing 14.7 percent. Ultimately, Blinder argues for another round of stimulus—specifically, giving businesses that grow their payrolls a tax credit—while calling for a serious long-term deficit reduction package.