25 October 2010

Citizens Against Government Waste Apparently Not Against Stupidity

I caught this ad on Sunday, right before “Meet the Press,” and found it to be pretty jawdroppingly ugly. But what I failed to realize was just how stupid the ad is.

 

To sum it up: CAGW believe that in a few decades, a random Chinese professor would interpret the collapse of the American economic empire the exact same way that a current teapartier does. WHO KNEW, right? It’s analogous to how Scalia knows that the right way to interpret the Constitution is exactly the way a Regan conservative would interpret it.

 

To review: China, who have a GDP of 4 point some trillion dollars, and enacted a stiumulus bill of 600 or so billion dollars, will be deriding the US’s foolish, 900 billion dollar stimulus? (The US GDP is, of course, in the neighborhood of 14 trillion.)

 

To continue: a Chinese political scientist or economist would mock the US not for deregulation of the financial sector, not for two unaffordable wars, not for fealty to a corporatist interpretation of the free market, but for borrowing from China? A country with a highly centralized economy dictated in stringent terms by the government would mock America for turning its back on practices that do not currently exist in China?

 

The ad doesn’t quite indicate whether this Chinese academic had his “come to Jesus” moment on free market economics, but a small government conservative think tank can dream, can’t it?

 

(Full disclosure: I got into an argument with a CAGW lobbyist a few months ago in class. Who was right about Stupak, huh? The one of us who said he needed support from single issue voters, or the one of us (ahem, me) who said maybe, just maybe, he really did oppose funding for ending pregnancies for purely moral reasons? Incidentally, what makes this story great is that he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection the day after our argument, proving me right.)