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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)2/17/2013 10:36:59 am PST

re: #241 Kronocide

So has this ever been proven out through actual math? It’s an article of faith oft repeated by conservatives.

Less taxes = more tax revenue

Because I’m running numbers on a spread sheet and it does not hold true unless you wildly inflate the population numbers.

It also handwaves how hard it is to cut out waste and duplication. Another word for duplication is redundancy. New York City doesn’t have, it turns out, a lot of redundancy in its flood control systems, but it does in its flood repair systems. The result of that was that a lot of damage got done, but it got fixed pretty damn quickly.

The problem is fixing that long-term will take flood protection, not flood repair. To do serious flood protection just New York and parts of New Jersey would probably cost a huge amount— like $50 billion dollars if it’s done expertly, maybe more like $150 billion to account for the risks of a project that big. But the economic damage from Sandy was at about $70 billion. It’s obviously worth it. But the cost of doing something goes on the budget, and the cost of doing nothing doesn’t.

That’s how the GOP tricks people into thinking that cutting budgets is fiscally responsible. They pretend that these costs, from disasters and the like, that could be prevented by government action, aren’t accountable. If you spend fifty billion to fix a problem, they’ll yell and scream even if the problem costs the nation a hundred billion, because the cost is born by the nation, not the government.

It’s a very bizarre worldview that I’ve never really been able to understand.