Department of Repetitions

Robert H. Frank, a Cornell economist who has always struck me as a great practitioner of the art of deciding where you want to end up and coming up with the theory to justify it (I touch on some of his ideas about inequality in this Slate story) advances a tax on consumption as the solution to the current fiscal crisis. Says Frank:

... with the country sliding into what promises to be a sharp and protracted economic downturn, it is imperative to increase spending over the short run, regardless of how we pay for it.

Frank's idea is that we increase government spending (ok, we get this) ... and then we pay for it with a consumption tax. Huh? Doesn't that just cancel out what you hope to get from the government spending in the first place? Well, yes. But Frank seems pretty set on the consumption tax idea--he floated the exact same proposal a year ago. What a nice silver lining to the current crisis: any idea that never quite got off the ground can be resurrected as a "solution."