You’re probably sick of hearing about this. So am I but it’s really very important so I am writing about it once again. It seems the President is in a steel cage match with various grunts from the Republican party, all of whom are trying to get him to cut all the social programs that separate us from the Third World and leave untouched all the tax issues that mostly effect people who already have more money than they can reasonably spend.
Fiscal responsibility is certainly to be admired but there are limits to its applicability in an advanced society. The Republicans simply don’t understand those limits.
Last week Mitch McConnell walked out of a meeting with The President. He walked out. Where does this punk, already a proven liar, get the nerve to walk out on the President of the United States? If Obama has any grit he will ban McConnell from any further talks on a subject that is far too important to have children taking their balls and going home.
Then Boehner stuck his two cents in stating that, “Washington has been on a spending binge for too many years. Yeah, John, from 2000 to 2008 and who was in charge then?
He also says that Americans know that tax increases destroy jobs. Must be that super tanning cream seeping into his brain because everyone who can read and add… oh dear, I forgot we’re talking about the party that doesn’t read. But those who do, know that jobs historically have gone down in tax cut eras. Those are facts fellas. I know you don’t know anything about facts but some time you’re going to have to learn the difference between a fact and a lie.
The fact is, that if the Republican’s are so worried about the deficit, they should raise the debt ceiling immediately because nothing will be worse for the deficit that allowing the nation to default. Of course, again, this is a matter of being able to read and add.
It’s very simple. Spending cuts alone cannot fix the deficit. If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to extend past the 2012 cutoff, lost revenue from them plus lost interest would account for 45% of the projected $11.2 trillion deficit for the next decade. This is ridiculous, considering how modest the tax cuts Obama wants really are. Let’s take a look
Unnecessary oil industry subsidies $40B over 10 years
Oil Company tax accounting change $72B over 5 years
Tax break for corporate jets $3B over 10 years
Private money-managers loophole $20B over10 years
Limit write-offs for those earning
over $500K $100B over 10 years
Add these to the elimination to the Bush tax cuts, a move that will effect only about 1% of the richest of the rich and throw in stuff like ending corporate farm subsidies and the ethanol subsidy and you can create savings that will take huge chunks out of the deficit without having to savage needed social programs. Then, of course there’s always the military, the fattest budget in the history of man, but I already did that in another blog.
I hate to keep pounding on the same nail but our financial problems were created during a Republican administration and rather than taking responsibility for them, the current crop of Republicans, most of whom were in office then, are trying to destroy any hope of rebuilding the economy. They are doing this in hopes that a blind electorate will regard Obama’s inability to solve a problem he did not create and blame him for the results of that failure. The reality is, that if the Republicans had forced the banks to re-loan the TARP money or had not stood in the way of increasing the numbers of the Stimulus, we may, by this time, have had enough infrastructure projects underway that the employment rates would be 2 or 3 percent lower than they are today. People who earn money pay taxes. Taxes reduce deficits. It’s not nuclear physics. If the Republicans had any other goal but defeating Obama they would already understand this and have accepted it. Unfortunately their goal is not to help the country, it’s to help themselves.