The Conspiracy Against Economic Growth

August 13, 2010 06:17


“Our political and media elites want a bigger, more intrusive, and more expensive government, and they want a Value Added Tax (VAT) to pay for it. Their strategy is to de-legitimize other alternatives-particularly faster economic growth-to the point where they cannot even be discussed.

By Louis Woodhill at Real Clear Markets

Excerpts:

‘On July 11, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of President Obama’s Debt and Deficit Commission, made the following statement in a speech to the National Governors’ Association annual meeting in Boston:

“We can’t grow our way out of this. We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem.”‘

“Now, why would a co-chairman of Obama’s Debt Commission make such an absurd assertion, and why would no one in the elite media challenge it? I believe that it is because our political and media elites want a bigger, more intrusive, and more expensive government, and they want a Value Added Tax (VAT) to pay for it. Their strategy is to de-legitimize other alternatives-particularly faster economic growth-to the point where they cannot even be discussed.

An example of this “conspiracy against growth” is the CBO’s LTBO itself. The CBO assumes that economic growth over the next 74 years will average 2.16%. While the CBO considers the impact of various assumptions on the trajectory of the national debt, it does not consider (or even mention) the possibility of higher growth. This is particularly striking because over the 74-year period from 1935 to 2009, America’s real annual economic growth averaged 3.73%.”

FULL STORY



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