Are Republicans Deliberately Holding Back the US Economy?

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/06/did-republicans-deliberately-crash-the-us-economy.html

Michael Cohen, followed by a few comments of my [Mark Thoma] own:

Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy?, by Michael Cohen, CIF: So why does the US economy stink?

Why has job creation in America slowed to a crawl? Why, after several months of economic hope, are things suddenly turning sour? The culprits might seem obvious – uncertainty in Europe, an uneven economic recovery, fiscal and monetary policymakers immobilized and incapable of acting. But increasingly, Democrats are making the argument that the real culprit for the country's economic woes lies in a more discrete location: with the Republican Party.

In recent days, Democrats have started coming out and saying publicly what many have been mumbling privately for years – Republicans are so intent on defeating President Obama for re-election that they are purposely sabotaging the country's economic recovery ... in order to hurt Obama politically. Considering that presidents – and rarely opposition parties – are held electorally responsible for economic calamity, it's not a bad political strategy.

Then again, it's a hard accusation to prove: after all, one person's economic sabotage is another person's principled anti-government conservatism.

Beyond McConnell's words, though, there is circumstantial evidence to make the case. Republicans have opposed a lion's share of stimulus measures that once they supported, such as a payroll tax break, which they grudgingly embraced earlier this year. Even unemployment insurance, a relatively uncontroversial tool for helping those in an economic downturn, has been consistently held up by Republicans or used as a bargaining chip for more tax cuts. Ten years ago, prominent conservatives were loudly making the case for fiscal stimulus to get the economy going; today, they treat such ideas like they're the plague.

Traditionally, during economic recessions, Republicans have been supportive of loose monetary policy. Not this time. Rather, Republicans have upbraided Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, for even considering policies that focus on growing the economy and creating jobs.

And then, there is the fact that since the original stimulus bill passed in February of 2009, Republicans have made practically no effort to draft comprehensive job creation legislation. Instead, they continue to pursue austerity policies, which reams of historical data suggest harms economic recovery and does little to create jobs. In fact, since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have proposed hardly a single major jobs bill that didn't revolve, in some way, around their one-stop solution for all the nation's economic problems: more tax cuts.
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[Mark Thoma's remarks:]

Has the Republican Party's strategy been deliberate? Yes, of course, the things the Party proposes do not fall randomly from the sky, they are the result of GOP choices. So the question of whether they did this on purpose is easy to answer, it's yes.

Is it intended to undermine the president's agenda? Again, of course it is. The alternative would be to support Obama's policies, and they aren't about to do that. So Republicans have been deliberately obstructive, and it would be hard to argue otherwise.

Have they intentionally done harm? This is where flip-flops from what Republicans supported in the past matters. If they truly believed that all Keynesian type policies are harmful, then blocking them, and in the process blocking any policy at all -- which is essentially what they are doing since they surely know their pet policies have little chance of escaping a veto -- could not be considered an act of sabotage. The policies may be quite harmful in reality, but if they truly believe they are avoiding harm by blocking stimulus policies it would be hard to accuse them of sabotaging the economy in order to make political gains. But the fact that they have flip-flopped time and again on policies they supported when Republican presidents were in office and the economy needed help leads to the strong suspicion that blocking Obama's policy initiatives is a political strategy. The strategy is justified by a story about Keynesian economics being harmful that they clearly do not believe in their heart of hearts (witness, for example, Romney worrying about the consequences of the fiscal cliff, or their knee-jerk appeal to Keynesian principles when defense cuts are proposed).

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To me, the refusal to support policies they would have supported had the president been a Republican tells me everything I need to know about whether this is strategic or a true belief.