Here's a fascinating Rachel Maddow segment that hits several recent themes:
- Republican governors doing to the down-trodden what Sherman did to Atlanta;
- Republican governors systematically deepening the financial crises in their states;
- Republican governors slashing benefits to finance tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy;
- and Charles Koch purchasing faculty hiring rights at a publicly funded university (Florida State).
Welcome to Florida.
There are a number of noteworthy points here.
▪ Extended unemployment hurts the whole economy.
▪ Paying unemployment benefits has a 160% benefit in bang-for-buck-spent.
▪ FSU faculty hiring rights? Really?
If FSU is for sale, no school is impenetrable. Most have in fact been breached already, but this moving in with an army.
Maddow even takes on the "ideological argument" — that these actions are motivated by people's ideas. (I've been pinging Paul Krugman on just this point recently, his thinking that ideas motivates his critics and nemeses.)
Maddow's conclusion on that score is exactly right (4:35 in the clip). These so-called small-government freedom-lovers are hypocrites who actually want the government stick to break as many heads as possible, so long as they're the ones swinging it and their enemies are wearing the heads in question.
There's a word for people who do that. And a word for those who vote them into office. Welcome to Florida.
GP
