Allow me to elaborate on this with additional facts.
As the Republican/Bush tax cuts turned the Democratic/Clinton surplus into a large Republican deficit our then Vice-President Dick Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter.”
On August 5, 2009 Forbes, hardly a liberal publication reported:
Still, Cheney was true to his word, as the White House of George W. Bush raised the federal deficit every year it was in office. When Bush started his presidency, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered at 60%. By the time he exited, it was closer to 80%.
(The National Debt is the total amount of debt incurred since the founding of the Republic. The Federal Deficit is the amount of debt incurred during a given year.)
Well, I guess Republicans can change their minds, can’t they. Maybe they realized they were wrong and deficits are a threat to the American economy. Well, they came up with the Ryan budget, which abolishes Medicare, and with an almost straight party line vote passed their own budget, because that is necessary to balance the budget. Really!! Guess what?
On April 22, 2011 The Economist, hardly a liberal publication, had this to say:
Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programmes for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.
I'm not really sure what "courage" is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards. For 30 years, certainly since Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, the most dangerous thing a politician can do has been to call for tax hikes. Politicians who call for higher taxes are punished, which is why they don't do it. I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is a structural bias rooted in class.
Yes, the conservative Economist is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”
Even Charles Krauthammer, that beacon of the Right, writing in the Washington Post:
You cannot govern this country from one house. Republicans should have learned that from the 1995-96 Gingrich-Clinton fight when the GOP controlled both houses and still lost.
If conservatives really want to get the nation’s spending under control, the only way is to win the presidency. Put the question to the country and let the people decide. To seriously jeopardize the election now in pursuit of a long-term, small-government, Ryan-like reform that is inherently unreachable without control of the White House may be good for the soul. But it could very well wreck the cause.
Please note that he is not worried about wrecking the country, only wrecking, “The Cause”
He then inadvertently exposes his own hypocrisy by advocating:
…tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles commission that, in one option, strips out annually $1.1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes while lowering tax rates across the board to a top rate of 23 percent.
Which is exactly what, among other things, Republicans have been opposing, because it would increase revenues, something they are adamantly opposed to.
In order to keep this post within reasonable length, I will address other aspects in my next post, which will be named “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)”
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