Jim Gibbons Refuses To Wrestle With Basic Math
While the appropriateness of Jim Gibbons’ running for Congress as a carpetbagger continues to draw debate, what hasn’t drawn debate is Gibbons’ inability to do basic math. Gibbons has proposed a “free money for everyone plan” that involves no one paying any income or payroll tax in the first quarter of 2010 in order to stimulate the economy. This sounds great in theory. After all, who wants to pay taxes? There is one little tiny problem with this. If Gibbons is essentially saying that the United States Government will take in no revenue in the first three months of 2010, how will the government pay for things?
Gibbons’s proposal doesn’t just remove the funding for “discretionary spending,” i.e. little things like our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, funding for schools, national parks, payroll for government employees and maintenance of interstate highways. It also remove the funding for mandatory spending, i.e. things like Social Security and Medicare. And, incidentally, the national debt right now happens to be in 14 figures and Social Security and Medicare are already facing long-term insolvency.
So while Gibbons’s plan sounds nice, it doesn’t seem entirely practical. If we’re going to implement the “free money for everyone plan” we need a way to pay for it. There are typically two ways that the government pays for things. The first is raising taxes, something that seems to be precluded under the Gibbons free money for everyone plan. The second is printing more money and creating inflation. This would seem be the logical way to fund the Gibbons free money for everyone plan. So if you liked the economy under Jimmy Carter, you’ll love the economic plan of Jim Gibbons, you get massive inflation and minimal effects on unemployment. But then again, you will have free money for everyone so it will even out.
5 comments December 12th, 2009
