So say many of the far right. Government is evil, after all, and incompetent, while private enterprise is governed by the invisible hand. This fundamentalist view of the market never ceases to amaze me, even when that "invisible hand" put kids in mines. Those same conservatives won't even acknowledge that government was the entity that got those kids out of mines.
But back to the fundamentalist market. If the free market is always better than government, then it stands to reason that private prisons would be more efficient than public. But as this report suggests, those private prisons mean that they are always pushing for more customers. More laws that put people in prison, after all, makes those private prisons that much more profitable. What goal would those private prisons have for reducing recidivism, or even encouraging release for good behavior. Those social goods would cost them money.
Ugh.
And apropos of our conversation in the last thread, Republicans are bragging about the fact that raising taxes is a non-starter. McConnell laughs at the idea and Boehner explicitly says that it won't happen, because we don't have a "revenue problem." That just annoys the crap out of me, as we see more and more calls for the poor to sacrifice, but no calls for the same for the wealthy. On the contrary, they want them to get more in tax breaks.
Obviously I have been reading TPM this morning, but another of their stories caught my eye on this topic. The CBO actually projects that if we allowed the Bush cuts to finally expire, kept the ACA intact and allowed it to do its work--that the deficit would gradually disappear.
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