JEFF SPROSS AND HIS “KILLER” REAL-WORLD POLICY

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Patterico:

3/7/2015

Jeff Spross and His “Killer” Real-World Policy

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:12 pm

 

Jeff Spross at The Week has a piece titled How to turn Frank Underwood’s America Works program into a killer real-world policy. The irony is deep but unintentional, for Spross’s suggested policies, taken to their logical extreme, have been tried . . . in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere — and they have literally killed millions of people.

 

Now that’s a “killer real-world policy”!

 

The piece is worth my time to debunk, because its ignorant fallacies are representative of the sorts of misconceptions that are destroying this country’s prosperity and freedom.

 

Spross’s dross uses as its springboard a proposal made by the fictional president of the series “House of Cards,” starring Kevin Spacey. (Season 3 was just released, and I binge-watched the first six episodes Thursday night. It is quite entertaining!) In an effort to create a grand program that might secure his political standing, Spacey’s presidential character proposes a giant jobs program, to be funded by equally giant cuts in entitlements. (Yes, it’s a fictional show.) Spross says that the cuts to entitlements would be horrible, but that government throwing billions of dollars into creating jobs is genius: