We tried courteous. We tried inviting. We tried group hug. What'd we get?
The same pit bull Republican extremism that got us into this mess. Okay. Plan B. Time to take the gloves off and take these petulant corpses to task.
"Corpses" because that's what they are. The walking dead. The Republican Party is utterly out of ideas, hope, vigor and the stamina needed to pull this country through her critically dangerous hour of economic peril. Their leaders are codgy, ghost white advertisements for funeral home makeup....Mitch McConnell? John McCain? John Boehner? Newt Gingrich? Tired relics of nearly two decades of failed financial Darwinism. Wallowing in the bitterness of defeat, this whole crew knows they likely won't live long enough to see their worldviews ever regain prominence. It's their leafless, cracking dried up tree, and they despise the fact that they're sitting in it. Their solutions are as dead as Milton Friedman, and so are they. It's just that no one bothered to tell the oxygen in their lungs.
The Republican solution....the only one, by the way, which we're supposed to believe is a one-size-fits-all answer to everything from unemployment to bank execs charging hookers to the firm....is to cut taxes. Cut, baby, cut. Never mind the glaring FACT that whatever cash Americans have right now they're hoarding....that's how scared we are. Never mind the fact that the last universal tax refund we supposedly got went from the US Treasury directly to an oil industry that conveniently decided we needed $4 dollar a gallon gas just as the checks arrived. Never mind that no one....from your neighbor looking to replace their 8 year old Honda to private equity firms looking to gobble up 8 more companies....has ANY kind of credit to use any quick cash infusion as a base for.
No one is SPENDING. That's why the government has to.
This is NOT tough math, here, folks. Trickle down tax cuts are a 4 minute rainstorm in a parched desert. The Stimulus is a slow but steady release of dam water that pools here, pools there....and gradually fills up the entire economy. And the key to opening those floodgates are JOBS. Today we find out that our national jobless rate is creeping toward double digits. We find out that every time a job comes open, 4 people are ready to grab it. That leaves 3 out in the cold. Literally. President Obama knows that once that ratio is brought down, when each one of those 4 job-seekers is secured with a paycheck, then they'll actually be confident enough to spend a little cash. A family pizza night at first. Then maybe the whole crew gets new shoes. Before long, they might be confident enough to think about a new mini van. And then, wonder of wonders.....there are some cheap houses out there, and the family is growing.
That's how it'll work. If you believe. If you have hope.
Last night on the floor of the Senate, Lindsay Graham....bitter neo-Confederate, failed guardian of our well being...actually said 'America's best days are behind it.' No, Senator. Your best days are behind you. You & the fawning cowboy capitalists, the chuckling power company execs, the high flying Wall Streeters, the smirking hedge funders, the pious free marketeers, the menacing oil oligarchs. The best days in America for all of you was when you could operate unhindered, unregulated, at will and for your own greedy ends.
You're right, Senator. If those were the days you thought were the best, they're dead. As dead as you look & sound.
"RNC chair: Only real jobs are those business creates" by David Edwards & Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Most state governors, including many Republicans, are strongly behind a stimulus bill that will fund government projects to put large number of people back to work and get the economy moving again.
"It comes at a time when we need it," Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, recently stated. "People need jobs. It's about jobs, jobs, jobs."
However, newly-elected Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele believes that government-funded jobs don't count as real employment because "a job is something that a business owner creates."
"What this administration is talking about is 'making work.' ... It's not a job," Steele explained during a Sunday appearance on ABC's This Week. "It ends at a certain point. ... These road projects that we're talking about have an endpoint. ... There's no guarantee that there's going to be more work when you're done that job."
ABC host George Stephanopoulos objected, "We've seen millions and millions of jobs going away in the private sector, just in the last year."
"They come back though," Steele insisted. "That's the point. They've gone away before and they've come back. And the point is, the small business owners take the risks. They're the ones that are out there in the morning putting the second mortgage on the house ... so that they can employ your kids."
Describing the present once-in-a-generation economic crisis as merely "the downside" of a recent period of economic expansion, Steele told Stephanopoulos that all we really need is "tax credits and relief for small-business owners, incentives for people to get back into the credit markets, to deal with the mark-to-market rules that have stymied the banks and deal with the housing crisis."
The idea that the government should focus its efforts on creating "permanent" jobs has recently taken hold among conservative editorial-writers as well as Republican spokespersons. For example, the Kalamazoo Gazette recently wrote, "The smartest way to invest our tax dollars is in initiatives that create and grow jobs for our citizens. Permanent jobs. Jobs that support families. Jobs for the future. ... If the benefits provided don't directly affect job creation or economic growth, we say they shouldn't be included."
As Newsweek argues, however -- responding to comments by Steele, among others -- "Borrowing and spending are pretty much how the government has pulled itself out of every modern recession. ... In a period when Americans are losing jobs at a furious clip, when the economy is shrinking rapidly, when monetary policy is near exhaustion, and when tax cuts aren't likely to work as they do in ordinary times, the highest priority is simply to stop the downward spiral."
"Big Spending Republicans Suddenly Wary of Deficits" by Mike Lillis, Washington Independent
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is scheduled to hold a press conference today to decry the Democrats’ stimulus package “and the trillions of dollars being added to an already $10 trillion debt,” as his statement puts it.
This is an old argument, of course. The GOP has long-fancied itself the party of fiscal responsibility, which is strange because the image has no basis in reality.
Consider the following: When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the federal debt was about $908 billion, according to Treasury Department figures. Over the next eight years, that figure rose to $2.6 trillion, representing more unpaid spending than the previous seven presidents combined could fritter — all in the name of smaller government, of course.
By 1992, President George H.W. Bush had bumped that figure to $4.1 trillion, to which Bill Clinton added another $1.6 trillion by 2000 — meaning that Bush the elder racked up about the same amount of debt in four years that Clinton did in eight.
Then the real spending started.
Under the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush, the country accumulated another $4.3 trillion in unpaid bills. For roughly six of those eight years, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, meaning they wrote and approved the budget bills that dictated federal spending.
The result? Well, in 2007, roughly nine percent of federal outlays — or $237 billion — went to pay the interest on the debt alone. That’s nearly one-third of the cost of the economic stimulus bill moving through Congress right now.
We know that McConnell will blame the Democrats for their reckless spending and failure to tilt the stimulus bill more heavily toward tax cuts. It would be nice also to hear an apology for his party’s own binge.
No comments:
Post a Comment