Provided courtesy of CTMSR.com

New York Magazine

Jonathan Chait

The real news in Mitt Romney’s interview with Mark Halperin, as Charles Pierce points out, is that Romney openly repudiated the central argument his party has been making against [Alleged] President Obama for the last three years: that he spent too much money and therefore deepened the economic crisis. Indeed Romney himself had been making this very case as recently as a week ago (“he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.”) But in his Halperin interview, Romney frankly admits that reducing the budget deficit in the midst of an economic crisis would be a horrible idea:

Halperin: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?

Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression.  So I’m not going to do that, of course.

Read more at nymag.com ...

"Our national task today is to restore the conditions for economic recovery, without which our prosperity and our national security cannot be assured. We must restrain the headlong growth of the Federal budget; enact multi-year across-the-board tax reductions to spur new job-creating investment and productivity; roll back the tangle of regulations which needlessly hamper enterprises; and cleave to a sound monetary policy which preserves the strength of the American dollar. But even as we act boldly to achieve these goals, we most work to create the conditions for expanding the ownership of the nation's wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair chance to become true proprietors of their country."

--Ronald Reagan, Letter to Pierre S. du Pont IV, Delaware, 1981

"Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they'll be more industrious; they'll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress." 

-- Ronald Reagan