Matt Yglesias caught a remarkable series of tweets this morning from Rory Cooper. Cooper is Eric Cantor’s Communications Director and as such is committed to idiotic conservative beliefs. Earlier, White House Communications Director Daniel Pfeiffer said, “You don’t want to balance the budget for the purposes of simply balancing the budget.” Well, that was high-larious to Cooper. What idiots those guys are at the White House thinking you don’t want to reduce the debt just for the sake of reducing the debt!
Regular readers should know that this is how conservatives think. This is why they are so concerned about debt to GDP ratios instead of the debt interest burdens. Or to put it more simply: they don’t even know why they want to balance the budget, they just know that it is the good and moral thing to do. And this makes perfect sense when you consider that the Republicans are only using the budget deficit as a reason to lower taxes (!) and cut social spending.
You may remember David Frum’s series of tweets lampooning the NRA proposal that all we need is an armed guard at every school. Cooper was trying to do the same thing with his tweets this morning. Like with this one:
RT @jpfreire You don’t want to pay your bills for the sake of paying your bills. Or feed your kids just for the sake of feeding them.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) April 3, 2013
Except, of course, this is not the same thing. You don’t feed your kids for the sake of feeding them, you feed them for the sake of nourishing them and not causing them to die. Under normal circumstances (with a booming economy), you want to balance the budget so that the government’s borrowing is not taking capital away from the private sector. But right now, that isn’t the case at all. In fact, the private sector is sitting on loads of cash that they aren’t spending. So in fact, we don’t want to balance the budget because doing so right now would be really bad for our economy.
But conservatives don’t understand this. In fact, they think that reasonable economic principles that have been well understood for 70 years are high-larious. Because they are ignorant. And evil.
Afterword
In later tweets Cooper claims that balancing the budget is good for economic growth. As I pointed out: in the current economy this is not true. But there is no convincing him. He just keeps repeating “economic growth.” There is actual science behind that belief and Cooper does not understand any of it. It’s just talking points to him.
