Red State always thought of itself as the conservative answer to Daily Kos. The structure of diaries, recommended diaries, and front page articles is similar, the comment structure is similar, but what they never understood is that the strength of this community is in its numbers. Instead of the Daily Kos approach of letting everyone say whatever they want (with a few exceptions) and let the community decide what makes sense and what doesn't, they banned anyone and everyone who expressed any dissent from their orthodoxy. The moderators were pretty gleeful about doing it when they did, posting, "Blam!" and words to that effect when they were challenged about anything.
Of course, the result of that is the site is going to become an echo chamber where no one challenges the increasingly silly ideas promoted. Today showed where that can lead as a front page article declared the Red State solution to the economic crisis:
Eliminate all taxes.
Man, I really do wish I were making this up, but some things are beyond parody:
The most radical, and effective, thing we could do for the economy right now is this: Stop collecting all forms of Federal business, income and payroll tax. EVERY PENNY OF IT. RIGHT NOW.
Gasp! Yes, I said it, and I meant it. Go on an absolute, 100% Federal tax holiday. That’s a real shot in the arm that would suddenly inflate the economy by a solid $1.5 trillion or more per year.
Are you worried about the resulting fiscal deficits? Don’t be. There is a huge amount of demand for debt from global investors, and the credit crunch has blown a huge hole in private debt formation. That leaves a lot of room for the government to borrow more.
How many ways is this stupid? It's hard to keep track.
In the first place the, "debt is evil," argument is the only logical case against the stimulus. You can make a case that increasing the debt will cause more problems than the stimulus will solve, but if you just throw that away, you're not left with much. The other front page article demanding that blue dogs take the debt seriously and vote no on the stimulus bill is harder to take seriously when die hard conservatives don't really care about it.
Even without the fact that this "solution" destroys the underpinnings of the no vote group, this is a ridiculous argument. Let's see, you want to increase the debt even more than the biggest stimulus bill that anyone here had asked for, but instead of new bridges and roads and schools and grid improvements and health care gains, we'd get... errr... nothing.
The problem with our economy right now isn't that people aren't willing to take risks and create things; rather it's that there's no demand. When the problem is with supply, then yes, tax cuts make sense. However when no one is buying anything, we need to shore up that end. Tax cuts don't help people who are out of work.
I'm sure that Erick Erickson [1] thinks he's clever here, but it's not like we haven't seen this game before. Ending an emergency tax reduction is considered to be the same thing as a tax increase in Republican circles and needs to be fought to the death. Maybe Erickson should wonder why Afghanistan isn't doing better if tax cuts are such a panacea. One of these days they might understand that without societal stability, no one goes to work because they're too scared of getting kidnapped or murdered by the desperate masses who just want to be able to eat.
You know, I've made jokes about the Laffer Curve idea before. Even if you buy into the idea, it's still a curve and at some point even conservatives have to accept that lowering taxes will lower revenue collected. After all, if that's isn't the case, wouldn't 0% taxes collect infinite revenue? Sometimes I think that the conservatives actually agree with the reducto ad absurdum.
Remember this the next time that Red State tries to get taken seriously by the Republican Party. They're trying to be the gatekeeper and say who gets to run and who isn't a pure enough conservatism. They just showed the goal that they're heading for. Let's make sure that the public knows this too.
[1] Note: commentator Addison below pointed out that Erickson didn't write this; this article is a highlight of diaries that others have written. So he gets points for not having this idea on his own, but he promptly loses them for promoting them instead of laughing about it.