They sound like a bunch of eight-year-olds who think they’ve come up with an oh-so-clever way to trap dad into raising their allowance or something.
Kevin Drum on House Republican’s amateurish plan to hold America hostage to get stuff in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
There’s no mystery as to how the deficit rose during the Obama administration: lost tax revenue due to Bush economic downturn, and increased demand for social services due to the same “Great Recession”.
Of course, the Republicans have tried to add the Bush-era spending (unfunded wars, Medicare Part B, No Child Left Behind) to the deficits incurred under the Obama administration,which was entirely nonsense and political grandstanding.
But new CBO projections show that the deficit will return to the same levels it was at during the Bush administration by 2016 – a fact which should aid the Democratic nominee for president that year. So the Republicans are playing word games again, trying to switch from “deficits” to “debt”, saying that President Obama should have paid off all the Bush-era incurred debt during his two terms in office. Of course, Bush incurred that debt during a relatively robust economy spurred by war spending and borrowed money, wheras Obama had to deal with a budget while handcuffed by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
@2 Republicans are beside themselves because the deficit is falling rapidly. Even worse, not only has hyperinflation failed to appear, but crashing gold prices are impoverishing survivalists en masse. And it doesn’t get better for the extremists hoping to engineer an Armageddon: Not only hasn’t the economy collapsed, it’s recovering and growing. In summary, Teahadists and Republicans in general are in a shitty position approaching the 2014 and 2016 elections: Things are getting better for average Americans. The sun is beginning to shine on America again, and the only ting these cockroaches can do is scurry back into their dank holes.
Well…at present those “dank holes” include a number of states in which the GOP controls both chambers of the legislature as well as the governorship. Aside from working to suppress votes, if the shenanigans in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michgan are any indication, their strategy appears to be to bust wages, put people out of their jobs and homes and tank local economies in hopes the cancer will spread to the rest of the nation.
@2. Unless things get too good and people get complacent and don’t go vote.