Bill Maher’s Economically Illiterate and Vindictive Rant

By Greg Campbell
TPNN Contributor

The ever-classy Bill Maher took another step towards making legitimate political discourse more difficult on Friday with a post on his blog that called for President Obama to ram environmental taxes down America’s throat as a “f— you” to Romney donors.

On Friday’s post, he discussed the differences between the fiscal cliff crisis and the debt ceiling crisis. While I can agree with him that not enough Americans fully realize the difference between the two, the ignorance of his brief economic analysis made it impossible to see much else of value in his post.

With his patented “I’m right, everybody else can only be wrong” smugness, Maher made bold claims as to how to fix the debt crisis, saying,

“Not raising the debt ceiling means not paying our debts. Going off the fiscal cliff means paying off our debt by raising taxes and cutting government spending…

All this fiscal cliff panic is just proof that we are all Keynesians. Everybody knows that more government spending — whether it’s in the form of tax expenditures or social services, helps the economy grow. But you have to balance that with not letting your budget get out of hand.”

No, not raising the debt limit means taking away the abused credit card. Going off the fiscal cliff means allowing tax increases at a time when more money in the pockets of citizens is not only needed, but the best way towards economic growth.

Second, we are not all Keynesian. Keynes wasn’t even this kind of Keynesian. His economic theories advocated controlled spending, not reckless spending with no end in sight. Furthermore, government spending on infrastructure is very different than government spending on social services, which does not “create” anything but further government dependency.

Maher then switched gears somewhat to advocate for environmental arm-twisting mixed with spite towards those that dared to oppose the president;

“Since we’re looking for new revenue streams that aren’t income taxes, Obama should use this budget crisis — if you can call it that — to do something about global warming with a carbon tax. This may be his last and only chance to do something big since cap and trade didn’t work. And it would be just desserts for the oil and coal industries that went all in for Mitt Romney, a nice little personal f¬— you to the Koch brothers.”

Yes, that’s the kind of leader we should all want- the kind of executive that twists the arms of legislators to push a job-killing agenda as a means of sticking it to Republicans and those who had the audacity to give money to a candidate (like Maher did).

He’s all class.