Um… it’s the Republicans who are supposed to be the party of fiscal conservativism, right?
President Bush is sending Congress a $3 trillion spending blueprint that would provide a big boost to defense and protect his signature tax cuts.
It seeks sizable savings in government health care programs and puts the squeeze on much of the rest of government, but it would still generate near-record budget deficits over the next two years.
In the wake of 9/11, with the nation rallying behind him, President Bush used his political capital to slash taxes on the wealthy and ask Americans to go shopping. And folks wonder why our economy is heading toward a precipice?
George Bush may finally succeed in putting the big lie of Republican fiscal conservatism to rest due to his rapidly escalating government spending. People may finally be waking up to the reality that the GOP small government talking point was simply BS to justify their primary goal of tax cuts. The unfortunate result has been a massive increase in public debt that will be the responsibility of future generations to pay back. It would be one thing if this debt had been used to improve infrastructure or education laying the foundation for productivity growth. But unfortunately the money has been used for the least productive public use of all, war, and an unnecessary war at that. The GOP has been reduced to the single issue of tax cuts.
“Billions for defense but not one cent for health care!”
But don’t worry, John McCain says that he’ll fix the economy by “unleashing capitalism.”
I would like to see this question put to its readers on this blog … Is it racist for a Democratic voter to vote for Clinton over Obama, even though they prefer Obama, because they believe “other people” are racist, and won’t elect a black man over McCain? I want to know, is that a form of racism in itself? The act of denying Obama the chance to go up against McCain, because they believe a black man has less of a chance of winning against McCain than a white woman?
I know this is off-topic, but I hope one of the bloggers here poses this question to their readers. I suspect more than a few Clinton supporters are supporting her because she’s the more electable one, not because of her views, or her “experience.” I also suspect the experience question gives them cover for some degree of racism.
I would like
Based on your recent posting history, people should care less about what you would “like”.
Troll @4,
I’ve already discussed that thesis at length, referring to it as a Recursive Bradley Effect.
3 – Well, well, it would seem that under the Chimp and his rubberstamp Congress, capitalism in this country was put on a “leash”.
And wingnuts don’t tell me that the last two years were much different. Your Simian in the White House has had a working conservative majority between the obstructionist block in the Senate and the Bush Dog Dems in the House.
4 It’s not only off-topic, it’s stupid and irrelevant.
Go back to your cage.
@6, Thank you.
@8, You must be a Hillary voter.
I wish that the dems would have answered the tax and spend question at the debate by simply saying that tax and spend is a million times better than the borrow and spend fiscal policy we are currently in.
@1: ewp – nice post.
It is time to destroy the myth of republicans and fiscal conservatism. The republicans spend as though there is no tomorrow and our kids will be paying off the debt.
The amount of money wasted on Iraq alone is staggering – sweetheart deals, no-bid contracts and Blackwater thugs – all for the low price of our entire economy….such a bargain!
All for the tax cuts for the rich and the budget deficits and cuts to infrastructure, regulation (like tainted toys and subprime loans, education and health care.
Gee – I am so glad that this useless war is going on year 6 now with no end in sight to the drain on our treasury.
@4: Troll
Who cares?
Obama and Clinton both have better ideas and policies than the republicans.
Time for you to get over the race thing and vote for the best person to lead the country. I personally think Obama is the best choice – but that is my opinion. I don’t presume to tell others what to think – that is a republican way of doing things.
artfart will support anyone with a d behind there name as he did last time.he voted four times for chrissy.
@12,
I agree on both counts. Unfortunately, I think Clinton is closer to McCain than she is Obama. I want Obama to be our next President, but I think it will be Clinon vs McCain, and I think, sadly, McCain will win.
13 Actually, you’re wrong. If it were possible to have a matchup in November between Hillary and Ron Paul, I’d vote for the good Doctor without a moment’s hesitation.
I might even consider voting for Huckabee over Clinton. He’s almost as creepy as the Crawford Caligula.
I’m not terribly impressed with Gregoire, but I wouldn’t vote for Rossi if my life depended on it. Where the fuck is a Dan Evans, or even a John Spellman when we need one?
15 CRAP…My typing is getting almost as sloppy as Stephen’s. I meant for the “creepy” comment to apply to Rossi.
McCain is going to win over the Dem nominee? With what, his campaign theme of “We could be in Iraq for 100 years”, and “I don’t know much about the economy, ’cause economics isn’t my thing”? That’s not the winning message that’s going to draw independents to vote for him. McCain will be lucky to get over 40% of the vote, could be less if Ron Paul runs as Libertarian or Natural Law party candidate.
@17,
I think he’ll appeal to the type of people who reelected Bush. He’ll ask people who they want protecting them from the Bogeyman.
This budget is only $400 billion in the red by assuming Congress won’t spend a nickel in Iraq or Afghanistan this year or doing anything to fix AMT (the alternative minimum tax which, of course, is a tax increase on the middle class — but only on the middle class, not on the rich, which makes it okay).
This president doesn’t want me to work, so I don’t. After all, I’m a patriotic rabbit, so I have to do what my president wants. He doesn’t want me to work! He wants me to get rich by owning stuff, not by working, so I’m an Owner now. Like Republicans everywhere, I do no work and produce nothing!! This gets me a favorable tax rate. I pay only 1/3 the taxes on wages. If everyone quit their day job and spent their time flipping stocks and paying capital gains taxes, like I do, the government would be broke and the economy would collapse in no time! Personally, I think it’s a stupid policy but it’s what chimpface wants, so I go along because he is, after all, my president.
The best feature of Bush’s budget is that it’s DOA.
@9 I’m a Hillary voter in the caucus because I want a candidate you Republican assholes can’t roll. But I’m a Romney voter in the primary because I don’t want the warmonger. And, besides, I’m not particularly discerning and flip floppers are good enough for me.
Flip floppers are good enough for Republicans, too. See, e.g., besides Romney, McCain.
Isn’t it amusing how the two GOP frontrunners — the last 2 candidates left standing — are both guys who formerly tried to peddle themselves as moderates but now that they’re running for president they can’t get to Bob Jones U. fast enough to suck up to the religious right?
@15 Spellman? You’ve sure got a short memory. There are reasons why Spellman was a one-time governor, and would’ve been a no-term governor if he hadn’t had the great good luck to succeed the likes of Dixie Lee Ray, who was probably the most unpopular governor in state history.
He was a lousy administrator.
He raised the sales tax from 5.5% to 6.5%.
He screwed state employees, who retaliated by voting against him when he ran for re-election.
I was a state employee back then. With only 24 hours’ notice to state employees, Spellman changed the payroll system from biweekly to monthly, with a 1 month holdback, so suddenly state employees expecting to get paid the next day had to wait 6 weeks for their next paycheck. Many couldn’t meet mortgage payments or even buy food; this caused real hardship.
But Spellman didn’t stop there in his efforts to fuck over state workers. Given how low state pay was to begin with, which had gone even lower during the Ford-Reagan Inflation because raises didn’t come anywhere close to keeping up with the raging inflation of those days, many state workers qualified for food stamps. So, Spellman ordered DSHS to deny food stamps to state employees. This was illegal and was ultimately reversed by the courts (as a result of a class action lawsuit brought by Legal Services attorneys on behalf of poor state employees), but it took years to settle this through litigation. Meantime, some state workers and their families actually went hungry. Probably a few, already facing eviction notices, had to quit their state jobs in order to get food stamps so they wouldn’t starve.
To add insult to injury, Spellman issued a proclamation saying banks “should” help state employees who couldn’t pay their mortgages by “voluntarily forbearing” from assessing late penalties and allowing the workers to skip a payment. Know how many banks honored that voluntary proclamation? None. Zip. Nada. Zero. Not a single state employee got any relief or assistance under Spellman’s silly proclamation, which of course was nothing but public relations posturing.
Needless to say, one of the primary reasons Spellman lost to Booth Gardner in the 1984 election was because over 100,000 angry state employees voted against him en bloc. Add their angry spouses, plus friends and extended family members, and by this one stroke Spellman probably created a bloc of a quarter million anti-Spellman votes.
And what did he get out of it? According to press releases put out at the time, by keeping the state payroll in the bank an extra 6 weeks, the state earned $4 million in extra interest — a puny sum in relation to the budget shortfall Spellman and the legislature had to patch. Which leads to a strong suspicion that he did it merely to gratuitously bully the state workers, simply because he could. It was a costly demonstration of arrogance that ended his political career and chased him from public life forever.
Mrs. Rabbit and I were both state workers then, and I remember vividly how hard this was on us. We had a baby rabbit to support and couldn’t even buy baby milk. Spellman was a fucking asshole. I hate that sonofabitch. I will hate him for the rest of his life. I will hate him after he’s dead. When he dies, I’m going to find out where they bury him, so I can go defecate on his grave. The bastard! There was no reason for it. He was simply being a prick.
In private business, it’s axiomatic that you pay the hired help first, and the business owner gets paid only if there’s money left over after meeting payroll. Back in 1981, when some Republicans still had some honor, meeting the payroll was a sacred rule that no one broke. But Spellman broke that rule — and he did it not because he had to, because he didn’t have to, or because it materially helped close the budget deficit, because it didn’t, but simply to show the world what a big prick he was. This was around the same time Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, who had gone on strike over truly abysmal working conditions, to show the Russians what a big prick HE was. At least maybe that served some sort of foreign policy purpose. But Spellman, a little man who probably got his inspiration for his little act from Reagan’s big muscle-flexing act, had no purpose to serve. Spellman was merely being a prick for the sake of being a prick simply because he WAS a prick who enjoyed playing the role of a prick.
Fuck that bastard. Don’t ever say anything good about Spellman here, or I’ll straighten your fur hairs for you.
Spellman also was the fucking genius behind the fucking brilliant Kingdome.
Spellman owes what little reputation he has to Dixie Lee Ray. Lucky for him Dixie got to be governor, too, or he would be remembered as this state’s worst governor ever. Thanks to Dixie, he’s only the runner up.
The Republican Platform, in three easy phrases:
1. Invade everyone
2. Invite everyone
3. In hock to everyone
25 Actually, when Spellman took office, I was a state employee, but I worked at the University of Washington, and we always got paid monthly–on the 12th of the month, which many of us referred to as “the twelfth of never”. By the time he left office, I’d been forced out into the private sector because the Federal grants that had for years contributed to building what some still claim is “the world’s best health care system” were drying up.
When I got laid off, I didn’t waste any time doing an early withdrawal of what I had in PERS-2 because there was no way I could imagine the legislature not getting its greasy little mitts on the fund before I retired.
27 I always thought Dixy got a bad rap. Of course she did a lot to earn it. Smart as hell, but she really didn’t give a damn who she pissed off.
RR at 25: Thanks for the history lesson. I was relatively new to the state at that time, and had my own problems, and the national politics engaged me more, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the local politics.
Of course, the interest the state earned on that money was money rightfully belonging to the workers. A private employer who tried that trick would have been in violation of at least a couple of state statutes.
I suspect that Spellman was trying to take a page from Reagan’s playbook with the Air Traffic Controllers, showing he could “be tough with the public employee unions”, and intimidate them. Margaret Thatcher was doing similar things, starting a few years previously. But he wasn’t very politically astute: Thatcher and Reagan picked one small union and crushed them, thereby cowering the rest. He picked one of the higher-paid unions, so as to diminish support from the rest of unions. “Divide and Conquer”, and all that. By picking on ALL the public employees, he just pissed everybody off.
Okay, I heard that the budget is going to freeze or reduce Medicare payments. Which means fewer doctors will be accepting Medicare patients. Which is just fine by Bush.
But I also heard something about emergency rooms. Something about insurance companies complaining that people who could afford private health insurance weren’t buying it, because they knew they could get free care in the emergency rooms? And something about the new budget containing provisions which would allow emergency rooms to refuse patients without insurance? The idea is so outrageous, I am sceptical if there is truth behind it.
I would like to know if there is some substance to those rumors. Anybody got a reliable reference to the portion of any proposals dealing with that?
“A private employer who tried that trick would have been in violation of at least a couple of state statutes.”
That was around the time, or not long after the time, when that became a no-no. Prior to the change, it was pretty customary for employers to pass out paychecks on Friday about ten seconds before the banks closed, or if they had auto-deposit (which was just coming into its own) they’d “fudge” the deposit transactions so they wouldn’t be posted until the next business day after payday. A company the size of, say, Boeing could make over a million dollars putting the payroll into play in the international money market over a weekend.
“And something about the new budget containing provisions which would allow emergency rooms to refuse patients without insurance? The idea is so outrageous, I am sceptical if there is truth behind it.”
Uh, after the last eight years, would you put anything past these fuckers?
@34 “Uh, after the last eight years, would you put anything past these fuckers? ”
Yes, actually. For example I wouldn’t bet money on the prospect of anyone on this blog being arrested for their political views. Though perhaps some of y’all ought to be… ;-)
35 Hopefully not, but there are quite a few mechanisms now in place for arresting, deporting, indefinitely detaining, “harshly interrogating”, denying the right to leave or enter the country, or seizure of assets of anyone the executive branch sees fit to do so to–and enough people to whom it’s happened that it can’t be dismissed as a “hypothetical” threat.
That nobody who participates here has been subject to such–and sorry if I’m deflating anyone’s ego here–is that our online prattlings aren’t considered important enough. Basically, outside of this little circle, nobody hears us. This ain’t very important, folks. We’re just pissing into the wind.
1.3 Trillion just insane!!! I doubt there is any reality in this budget. I think they knew the gig was up and just threw together a wish list because they knew Dems. were going to deep 6 the whole crazy sham. I would hope the leaders of this country would take their responsibilities seriously. No luck.
How many liberals here listened to bush and went shopping?
Marvin@38: Excellent point. The wife and I are looking at the SUV Eli Manning received as SB XLII MVP. We like our vehicles big….