Junto Boys

ROBERT RUBIN EXPLAINS THE ECONOMY ON NPR

Robert Rubin was on NPR last night lightly praising the tax cuts for the stimulus they provided, but complaining about the particulars. I realized that NPR is better than anyone for providing critics for conservative ideology. When Bush had the tax cuts passed in 2001, Democrats were provided time on NPR to blame them for the recession within six months of their passage.

Now that the tax cuts are working, we get a more nuanced criticism. Rubin becomes the spokesman for the admitting the tax cuts did help, but his argument was that the cuts should have been more targeted and carried a sunset provision.

This was very clever on the part of NPR. They never once cited the prior critics of the tax cuts to discredit them. Now that the tax cuts have worked, the story isn’t about the people that they trumped up prior in opposition, but the new opposition to how they could have worked better.

In the case of Rubin, he is faced with a bigger quarterly growth rate than he ever saw during the Clinton years and instead of looking inward as to how they ran economic policy, he criticized Bush’s policy because the growth wasn’t as big as his theories would suggest had it been done his way. One wonders why Rubin wasn’t pushing this grand idea during the Clinton administration?

The next NPR guests will be homeless advocates. They will agree that tax cuts did help the economy but only for people who already have enough money. While some people are having a great life, street people have never had it worse. There won’t be any explanation about the homeless problem during the Clinton years.

The end result of the economy good or bad will be that Bush, that tool of the rich, has only lined his own pockets. And there won’t be any discussion of the hundreds of millions of dollars Robert Rubin has made on Wall Street.