Republicans, as the senior ranking party of the big bourgeoisie, want bad economies, high unemployment, business failures. One capitalist kills many.* The monopoly game is won in recessions when winners buy up losers cheap; and the value of their new holdings increase later. Another reason they want recession is that high unemployment puts downward pressure on wages. Finally, the bourgeois wants lots of people poor, messed up struggling, because in that state they are less able to unite ,organize and fight back. Workers are too busy trying to survive, fighting each other to struggle politically. The Republicans in Congress are purposefully trying to wreck the economy to create the above conditions.
They know austerity will hurt the economy. Krugman tells them that ,but they already know it. It is just that they _want_ recession. Economic destruction creates opportunities for them to vulturize and weakens the working class. Boehner and the Republicans _are_ Keynesians, but they use his principles in reverse - to cause recession, depression.
Janet Roe-Darden: Keynesians in reverse, anti-Keynesians?
Charles Brown: Keynes's theory is that increased government spending during a recession helps to end the recession, because it puts more money into the hands of the mass of consumers who then spend it , which spending increases business sales and revenues, which is what ends recession. The Republicans are trying to cause the reverse: cut government spending and cause recession.
* "As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. _One capitalist always kills many._ (emphasis added -CB) Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself..."