GOP's memo to America's unemployed: Drop Dead!

Stephen Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an enormously useful post in which he takes apart the Republican stance on the economy, the Federal Reserve, and the current unemployment situation across America.

He first establishes the governing philosophy of the party of 'no' since the mid-term elections:

Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.

The Republican party's public mantra has long been low taxes, smaller government, and accountability.  If anyone can find a Republican that has pursued this trifecta consistently while in congress I'd like to know, because the reality is that they have pursued low taxes for corporations and the very rich, while irresponsibly failing to engage in concomitant spending cuts.  Conservative economist Milton Friedman said, "for the government to spend is for the government to tax."  So, despite their claims, what Republicans are actually doing is shifting the tax burden, "explicitly or implicitly to tax somebody, either in the present or the future, either directly or indirectly, to pay for that purchase." They counter that that is not true, because the tax-cuts magically pay for themselves.  Again, this supply side voodoo-economics, has been shown to yield either no or minimal value to the economy and therefore do not pay for themselves.  For example, analysis of George W. Bush's tax cuts indicate that it produced an insignificant level of economic growth during his presidency. Hence, this is just the attempt of one group of people to evade paying taxes and force another group to subsidize their excesses.

Pearlstein recognizing the fallacy of the Republican tax-cut and spend mantra, estimates the impact of not extending the Bush tax cuts to small cash flow-through businesses and people earning beyond $250,000.

The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!

The impact of letting the richest people in the country pay the same taxes on the top tier of their income, as what they were paying during the Clinton administration in regards to the overall economy, is virtually negligible.

Regardless of the context, the same failed policies are trotted out as a panacea to every economic situation. And here is where the standard argument becomes exceptionally ugly. Knowing that their policies have failed and have lead to the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Republicans are demanding that not only that their rich-friends, who have been on a tax vacation for the past decade, not be further taxed, but that those who are unemployed "drop dead."  In their devious minds, they are now attacking the Federal Reserve for pursuing monetary policies that leads to full employment. Whereas these same miscreants didn't attack the Fed when it was bailing out their fat-cat friends on Wall Street and creating a firewall of secrecy that concealed the extent of the criminality between big business and the government when Republicans were in power. Their hypocrisy is endless.

Get sick; drop dead.
Need help in paying for a family member's health care; let them drop dead.
Need to upgrade your skills at college to get a job; drop dead.
Cannot find a job and you've used up your savings; drop dead.
Need help preventing foreclosure on your home; drop dead.

Obama's failure and the floundering of the American economy is their ultimate objective. In their minds the death of the American dream is their stepping stone back into power. Republicans are traitors to everything that the country is supposed to represent.