My Broken State, Part II

There will be plenty more where this comes from, sad to say.

Good posting on Calitics today by Robert Cruickshank about why raising taxes is preferable to (the inevitable, common wisdom) cutting spending (credit to Atrios, an actual economist, for pointing it out). Short take:

How will budget cuts help promote economic growth?

It's a question that I rarely ever see asked, and one that is never answered, certainly not in a state where the conventional wisdom is that revenue increases are impossible, even though we've never tried to make them happen. Instead the supposed "political reality" of no new taxes is trumping the economic reality that taxes are preferable to spending cuts in a recession. The result is that spending cuts are treated as inevitable even though they are a sure path to Depression.

I'm not saying he's absolutely right or anything, but I'd say it's a clear sign of how broken things are that no one is even raising the question as part of the "debate" on what to do about the broken budget.

Here's a hint for those in the state legislature: You can't win if you don't even play the game. It's unclear that they even know they're supposed to be in one.