The Crowbar

Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo has a strange stress-relief exercise:

I’m nonetheless comforted by the fact that the Republicans running things in the House GOP caucus are still as clinically insane as in years past

Marshall then attempts to misunderstand basic economics:

We see today from their House GOP ‘budget’ that their new-found allegiance to fiscal discipline has them lowering the top marginal tax rate to 25% (it’s currently 35%, with the Bush tax cuts), which for anyone who knows anything about the federal budget would pretty much inevitably lead to gargantuan federal deficits and the Treasury exploding probably some time early in the next decade.

Marshall obviously doesn’t know much about the federal budget or economics (he doesn’t care, really). I don’t know much either, but I do have a VERY simple concept down. If you tax at a 0% rate, the government gets zero revenue If you tax at a 100% rate, the government gets zero revenue.  A sane government’s goal is to maximize revenue. Too little revenue and you may not have enough to pay for necessary government functions (defense, inter-infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.). Too much tax rate and you demotivate your population and cause the economy to shrink and revenues to fall. It’s called the Laffer Curve and liberal economists like James Tobin and Paul Krugman detest it with all their might because it destroys their worldview that states you can tax the rich into oblivion and it have no effect on everyone else. Whenever you see liberal bloggers gnash their teeth and scream about “supply-side” and “trickle-down” economics you’ll know they’re in some serious denial. Back to Josh Marshall:

If that weren’t enough. This is the scoring the House Republicans have provided, tracking Democratic budget policy and theirs over the next 70 years. As you can see, predicting ideological stances over as yet unborn Democratic members of Congress, the GOP scoring appears to have us on track for the government owning about 90% of the economy in the early-mid-22nd century, which if I remember is about the time period of the invention of the warp drive. So I don’t know if they’ve figured that in too.

Ummm, yeah. The Republicans are such fools to think about future generations if we continue on the same track. Let’s just ignore all the warning signs and trust The One! Who’s clinically insane?