The Underground Conservative

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has an op-ed piece in this morning’s Racine Journal Times on economic recovery. Worth the read, especially this part:

With the exception of expanding bureaucracy, politicians don’t create jobs – they can enact policies with incentives for job creation and economic growth. Small businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers across America are the engines of economic growth. Job-creating policies – such as the economic reforms I’ve proposed in my Roadmap for America’s Future – must be focused on empowering those engines of growth, not further expanding the federal government at their expense.

No politician or elected official has ever created one single job. Not one. All they can do is enact policies and pass and sign legislation that either inhibit or encourage job creation.

However, there isn’t Thing One Ryan can do to stop the Democrats in Washington from pursuing the wrong-headed policies which they are championing. Policies which, as Ryan points out, crippled Japan’s economy in the 1990s.

Important lessons on our current crisis can be drawn from Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s, where deeply flawed policy responses lead to a protracted period of stagnation. In the early 1990s, Japan experienced a sharp economic slowdown resulting from the bursting of a real estate and stock market bubble. Sound familiar? In response, Japan’s policy makers pursued an aggressive agenda of fiscal stimulus packages after 1993. Japan’s preference for public spending at the expense of private investment led to record deficits, increasing government debt to 130% of GDP. Following the array of new spending projects, Japan made the critical mistake of raising its consumption tax rate in 1997, proving fatal for Japan’s already stagnant economy. Rather than addressing the significant structural problems in Japan’s financial sector or reducing taxes to spur sustained economic growth, Japan followed a path of increased spending followed by increased taxes. Such a path proved disastrous for Japan …

Of course. But the better, smarter crowd will be in control. You know, the smug, self-righteous. smartest kids in class who believe the only reason wrong-headed policies and economic systems like socialism haven’t worked is because the right people haven’t tried them.