Republicans and the Debt

First, a cartoon.

I begin with the cartoon because it nails the truth of the Republican zeal to reduce the debt. Their ideas are all based on cutting the social safety net that protects Americans in hard times. Republicans are more than eager to go back to times when senors ate pet food and died of untreated diseases.

I don't think I'm overstating the case.

If Republicans were all that fired-up about balancing the budget, then they would have to admit that they have to look at the revenue side of the federal budget. They'd have to acknowledge that the reason why the annual budgets balanced during the last years of the Clinton Administration was, in part, because George H.W. Bush raised taxes.

It is not an understatement to say that the tax cuts pushed through by Bush the Lesser added trillions to the federal deficit, for while cutting taxes, Chimpy and his band of merry torturers raised Federal spending. Chimpy entered into two wars without any increased tax revenue to support them; no special "war taxes" of any kind. He put two wars entirely on the national credit card.

And this is what it got us:

Yet all the lackeys of the Koch Brothers in the GOP now can do is scream about Medicaid and Social Security. Not a peep about asking the wealthy to cough up a few bucks more. Even though they are the ones who have mostly made out during the thirty year war on the middle class that the GOP has been waging.

For income for the wealthiest has been largely going up for the last thirty years:

(source)

While tax rates for the wealthiest have been coming down like a Bonanaza full of doctors.

And CEO pay continues to go up, even as those same CEOs lay off employees by the stadium-full.

If we are going to make seniors, the schools do with less, if we are going to cut back on FAA safety inspectors and slash infrastructure repairs and improvements, if we are going down the road where life gets meaner and harder for average Americans because the streets become pot-holed tracks worthy of a Third World nation, fire trucks are slow to show up and there are fewer cops on patrol, then the least we can do is tell the rich that they also have to cough up a little.

But making the rich pay taxes is heresy to the GOP. Since the national press now serves corporate interests, you'll see very little coverage of this (other than maybe an opinion column by Paul Krugman}. And there is not a single Democrat of national note who is willing to stand up to the fiscal rapists in the party of Hoover and call them out on this. No, they are all to happy to just go along, which is why in the last clusterfuck of what passes for negotiations with hostage-takers, the Hooverites got about 80% of what they wanted.

We are so screwed.