Some Mitt Romney supporters I have talked to say that one of the reasons they support him is because he will fix the federal budget. They claim he understands economics and is a smart businessman. After all, as governor of Massachusetts he walked into a huge budget deficit and balanced it by the time he left, they say. Never mind that Mitt Romney increased state “fees” and modified the tax code to bring in an extra $740.5 million per year in state revenue to make that happen (but hey, he didn’t “raise” taxes!). Well, I say that he doesn’t understand our economic problems and he definitely won’t solve them if he becomes president, for one very important reason: He believes in the same fallacious economic policies that all of our leaders have for the last 80 years, known as “Keynesianism”. It was Richard Nixon who notoriously said, “We’re all Keynesians now.” George Bush was a Keynesian, Obama is a Keynesian, and so is every other 2012 presidential candidate, save Ron Paul.
So what is a “Keynesian“? A Keynesian is someone who follows the economic school of thought started by John Maynard Keynes. To break down the Keynesian economic philosophy into simple terms, I’ll share a comment I made to a Mitt Romney supporter on Facebook yesterday. He was responding to someone else that called Mitt Romney a Keynesian and he claimed: “We can’t blame this one on John Maynard…where we ‘at’ is where President Obama has put us ‘at’”.
I made this short comment in response explaining what Keynesianism is and why Mitt Romney cannot possibly solve our economic problems:
Blaming Obama for where we are at completely ignores all the Keynesian policies that Bush followed. Keynesian 101, in its simplest form is 1) lower interest rates to stimulate economic activity 2) if interest rates can’t go any lower, then government deficit spending is required to stimulate the economy.
Bush took care of #1, now Obama is working on #2. Both Obama and Bush have been in lock-step on all fiscal/monetary matters. This is textbook Keynesianism in action and we are and will continue to suffer the consequences (all the way to a dollar collapse) if someone doesn’t reverse it. Mitt Romney may be somewhat decent on the fiscal, but he has openly stated that he will do nothing with the Fed, which ignores the monetary aspect. You can’t solve our economic problems by ignoring 1/2 of the problem (the biggest [portion of the] problem)
In fact, #1 above, i.e. the interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve, is THE cause of the business cycle. It’s because #1 was in effect during the Bush years that Ron Paul, Peter Schiff and others were able to predict the economic collapse years in advance. Just like all Keynesians, Mitt Romney only looks at the bust period of the cycle to figure out what went wrong, which leads him to support horrible policies like the bank bailouts (TARP). They don’t even consider the damage done to the economy by the low interest rate policies brought about by the credit expansion (monetary inflation) of the Federal Reserve that created the boom in the first place. Since Mitt Romney ignores the root cause of our economic problems, he will never solve them. Nothing of significance will change under Mitt Romney. And I don’t need to be Ron Paul or Peter Schiff to know that if we continue down this Keynesian path, destruction of the dollar is at the end of this road.
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