I know what they’ve been telling you. They’re telling you that if you can balance your household budget, the government should be able to balance one as well. This is simplistic and misleading. It doesn’t matter. You’ll believe it anyway.
They’re telling you that tax hikes kill jobs. Oh, really? How come they didn’t kill jobs in the 90’s when Clinton was president? And we’re not talking about all tax hikes, just the ones on the rich.
In fact, this has been said for years since Ronald Reagan. The rich have always said, “If you lower our taxes, we’ll create new jobs”. This is untrue and you know it’s untrue because so many of us are out of work and hurting and the rich are paying the lowest amount of taxes in generations. So, you know, this is bullshit. But you’ll believe it anyway.
They’re not telling you how many jobs a deficit reduction is going to cost during the Lesser Depression. But you don’t have to be a politician to realize that if you take money out of the economy when people aren’t spending a lot to begin with, they’re going to spend even less afterwards. This will cause more people to be laid off. Your Republican politicians will tell you that reducing the deficit is going to make it possible to hire more people but they don’t tell you HOW that’s going to happen and they don’t tell you because they don’t have an answer. But they’ll insist that it’s true and they will repeat their carefully worded statements to make sure you remember them and you’ll believe them anyway.
So, believe them if you want. There’s nothing we can do to stop you. We’ve pleaded with you to stop watching cable and network news. We’ve begged you to be on your guard. We’ve shown you time and time again how the Republicans have lied to you about everything from war to the economy over and over and over again. But you will just have to feel the pain personally to really get it.
Here’s the bottom line: The Republicans are trying to make the economy so bad next year that you will not even consider voting for Obama in 2012. And you know what? That’s just peachy with me. He’s a walking, talking disaster and is no friends to New Deal Democrats. But as they’re taking Obama out, they’re going to take us with him. All of us younger voters will be jettisoned from the middle class by these bastards who you listen to. Our lives are going to get much harder. Our kids educations are going to get less interesting and a lot more expensive for us personally. In general, everything in life is going to get harder. You’re going to suffer too. Most countries fought their way out of income inequality and servitude to freedom and prosperity. We’re doing the opposite, with your help.
But there doesn’t seem to be any other way to knock sense into you so here we go.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Filed under: General | Tagged: debt celiling, Economy, Republicans |
The Confluence 
Excellent post
The balanced budget amendment would prohibit government from spending borrowed money additional to what it actually makes in any given budget period.
That is what is called “deficit spending.”
And that, of course, is exactly what it is intended by its supporters to do.
It is often said that since ordinary people have to balance their budgets the govenrment should, too.
But ordinary people do not have to balance their budgets in this sense and would find it as ruinous a limitation as government.
You couldn’t buy a house or a car.
You couldn’t furnish that house after you bought it.
You couldn’t use credit to pay up-front charges for essential medical care.
Many people couldn’t buy appliances or do needed household repairs or improvements.
The whole idea is a fantasy.
Just sayin’.
Good post.
Perfect. We need to hear the reality of the need to borrow more. The states that have balanced budgets in their constitutions and municipalities borrow money and run deficit spending, and unlike those local governments that can ask for deficit spending through the ballot box, the federal government doesn’t have that mechanism.
Balanced budget is almost an impossibility in a modern world, not unless we go back to live like in the days before the industrial age.
I should have not said we need to borrow more, but that when we need to borrow, we need to have the flexibility to do it.
Good post. Spooney Tunes and Chickenpoop have turned the comments off at Hullabalooney. They’re plugging their ears and humming real loud.
In 2007 Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm about subprime loans, but she was ignored, not because the Democrats didn’t believe her, but because they wanted the recession for their own ends. The Republicans are simply paying Obama and the Democrats with the same coin plus interest.
Yeah, that old household budget analogy really misses the mark. But, that’s the point. If republicans used an analogy that does fit, it would defeat their own argument.
I really enjoyed your post. The problem is the politicians in power are listening to their lobbyists, you know the people with the money. The American people, Republicans or not, that follow the thinking of these politicians that keep pushing this faux agenda of deficit reduction while they drink their fine wines and cheeses need to be educated. They probably are not reading your blog. Those people are probably listening to Rush and Fox News while worrying about their own bills. They see government as a problem not a potential part of the solution. They have been ingrained with that personal responsibility thing and the words “job creators”. These people honor the likes of Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh, not Bernie Sanders!
If tax cuts created jobs, we should be at 110% employment after 12 years of Bush/Obama tax cuts that were supposed to end in two….even if it worked, the bastard rich sit on everything they were suppose to” trickle ” down….
we are told we must keep giving them stuff , so they will give it back…but they don’t of course ….over and over.
They are dismantling the US into pieces to sell off much as suits do to a company. They keep saying we aren’t Greece…by which they mean there is more meat on the bone here for the Dogs of Austerity to tear at…that’s the only difference
Excellent post. I would add the resulting loss in growth from the cuts to government spending will increase the federal deficit by more than the amount of money being cut. But then this was never about deficits; it is about our plutocrats looting the country and getting both Goppers and Opologists to reward them for doing it.
And no, gutting government won’t change that-they are happy to use the government to transfer money to themselves, but they don’t require it. The rest of us DO require government-though clearly not the one either party is offering-to stop them. Something a Republican named Teddy Roosevelt realized over 100 years ago.
as usual.Excellent post 🙂
Matt Stoller too advocates turning off/ away from the tv and having layed out the different ways in which people see the Presidency: Legislator/ Narrator/ Governor-in-Chief he summarizes:
(h/t commenter MO Blue at TL.)
RD, the grave problem is that no one is listening, to the other, to logic. I continually discover this fact as during the ’08 primary when no obot replied to me, Oh you’re right, aran, Hillary would make a better president. Or when I recently had a conversation with a neighbor when I was remarking generally how politicians of both stripes should jump on Medicare waste and fraud and save $600B over 10 years and she offered repub talking points. Or when I was talking to a fellow dem about the hit Medicare providers could take in Obamacare (and in this new deal) and she jumped on my having teased this fact out of a repub (George Will) post.
I respect your anguished plea for a return to New Deal dem values and ideals and I too would like for dems to unite over that platform again. I just don’t see it happening until the people stand up to representatives and the corporate world and say, enough!. Americans need to ask themselves what kind of country do they want. What kind of lives do they want for the elderly and seniors, disabled, unemployed and underemployed, the chronically sick, the poor, the young, and actually for all Americans. The worry isn’t just about the legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren, but how we win the present for all Americans.
I think all of us, need to up our game and demand changes by rebellion and revolt before it’s too late. My frustration is I am represented by 2 hard-core conservatives and a first term dem. I continually vote against the repubs and for the dems. I have e-mailed my differences with one of the elected repubs and she politely explains her position. If marches on Washington by dems/liberals would carry any weight, I would participate. But the dem party has no warriors to defend its platform and no burning desire to save itself or us.
“What kind of lives do they want for the elderly and seniors, disabled, unemployed and underemployed, the chronically sick, the poor, the young”: that is to say, the “useless eaters.”
It’s not just the Republicans. This was the cleavage in the 2008 primaries—the Democrats purging their needy constituents.
Also, Republicans, is someone like Michele Bachmann really a good model of democratic leadership and representation?
She and her husband recently took out a $417,000 federal loan (backed by fannie mae or freddie mac) for a lavish 5,200 square feet home on a golf course before she called for the entire dismantling of the two mortgage giants. She reasoned that it’s almost impossible to buy a house in this country today without the federal government being involved. She dodged questions about her husband’s receipt of Medicaid payments for his clinic therapy.
Where would Bachmann be without the federal government (salary and payments) she so abhors?
Honest to goodness, I would swear Obama lifted your post word for word in his address this morning, after the bill passed. It was almost comical that he now feels he must pander to those whom he jettisoned from the Democratic party in 2008. But it’s hard to laugh when our country is being ruined right before our eyes.
I suspect I have helped a lot of politicians write speeches (on both sides of the aisle). Someone(s) need to send me checks.
It’s classic Repug humor…talking about household budgets as an ideal just when they are leading the way to wrecking as many households as possible
mine is a wreck
[…] Anyone care to respond to her? I know what they’ve been telling you. They’re telling you that if you can balance your household budget, the government should be able to balance one as well. This is simplistic and misleading. It doesn’t matter. You’ll believe it anyway. […]