For All Of the Moaning Over The Deficit From the Right

When you listen to the "conservatives" bemoan the Federal deficit, try to keep in mind a few things.

1. The FY 2009 budget, which ran until September 30th of this year, was drawn up by the Bush Administration.

2. The FY 2000 budget reduced the Federal debt. The idea of the Federal government not being in debt so much scared the piss out of the conservatives, including then-Fed chairman Greenspan. They wanted the Federal government to be crippled by debt. That is why George W. Bush wanted his tax cut. The very last thing that the Republicans wanted to see was a prudent Federal government that could live within its means. And so, like the pack of predatory vandals that they were (and still are), they set about wrecking the place.

When you look at Federal debt as compared to GDP, the trend was clearly down since the the end of the Second World War until Ronald Reagan became president. Only one American president since the end of WW2 made a clear dent in the Federal deficit: Bill Clinton.

That was intolerable to the conservatives. The economic plans of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush clearly were designed to burden the Federal government with debt, to bankrupt our national treasury and to make it impossible for the Federal government to spend money on anything other than the military and debt service. There would be no ability by the Federal government to regulate anything, bringing about a conservative/libertarian paradise. The plan of the conservatives, in short, was to do to our government what the Cold War had done to the Soviet Union. Their plan was to do it slowly, so by the time it happened, no one president or even party could be blamed.

The problem for the conservatives was that they forgot to factor in human greed. They got their deregulation of the financial sector and, in less than a decade, the greedy fuckers on Wall Street and in the banking industry wrecked the economy. It happened too quickly; George Bush and Dick Cheney saw the danger of allowing the economy to collapse that fast, for it would mean that the Republicans would be finished as a party for at least a generation. So a Republican president began the process of handing out huge amounts of money to retard the economic collapse. Even Bush couldn't take the heat for letting GM fail, so he began that process as well.

Re-regulation is in vogue, now, and the bankers may not be able to stop it. Tax increases for the wealthier Americans is just a matter of time, as well.

And the Republicans, who were behind the savaging of the economy, now are moaning about the very same Federal deficit that they brought about. The Republicans are whining about the rate of unemployment at the very same time they do what they can to make sure that nothing more is done to reduce it.

The Republican party is full of back-stabbing, freedom-hating, school-learning-despising, middle-class-destroying weasels. Trust them at your peril.