A PICTURE IS WORTH...

A PICTURE IS WORTH...
Gun's don't kill people. People with guns kill people.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"No body could have done a better job than Obama, with the economy he was handed —including me!" —Bill Clinton—

Thursday, March 10, 2011

"Deficits don't matter!"

Remember the good old days of Bush and Cheney as they ran up the national debt by billions—and Cheney—famously said to Paul O'Neill: "Deficits don't matter"

"The then, Secretary of the Treasury, O'Neill, was fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, after he also raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said Bush balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency. You remember the whole ENRON corporate crime thingy.

In the aftermath, O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due", referring to tax cuts for multi-millionaires, like himself. (While he was at it he threw a few billion dollar no bid contracts to his cronies at Haliburton.) A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
Since Ronald Reagan, a majority of Republican politicians gradually came to conclude, as Vice-President Dick Cheney famously told former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, that "deficits don't matter."

Supply-siders believed deficits didn't matter because tax cuts would boost investment and productivity and that the economy would grow its way out of debt.

The opposite, "starve the beast" faction, epitomized by—"I'd like to drown the government in the bathtub" Grover Norquist—wanted huge tax cuts that would indeed create deep deficits that will then force spending cuts. The fact that both things couldn't be true didn't seem to bother them. Because,"Deficits didn't matter" either way.

Between the two "so called Republican fiscal conservative" factions, that merry ideology played out over eight years, as it called for tax cuts in all seasons for all reasons—and—at the same time massive spending on corporate "entitlements", for all the corporate pigs at the government tit, financed by loans from China, to be paid later by the middle class taxpayers and the Social Security trust Fund that had a surplus of 2.3 trillion dollars."

Luckily their plan to borrow an additional 2 trillion dollars to "privatize Social Security" was stalled by an angry voter backlash when Americans woke up long enough shout NO!

Flash forward nearly a decade later and the American public has put the Republicans back in charge. Even after their drama filled exit from the White House two years earlier—when Bush bailed out Wall Street—the very same Wall Street—that the Republicans had spent several decades deregulating for their banker friends.

Since the mid-terms they have completely transformed themselves into—"Superdebt-slashermen"—each and every born again, Republican radical, Tea Baggin' hatchet man is to a man blaming: the size of government, the liberal elite, "big tax and spending" democrats, unions, the working class, and the middle class for the "debt crisis"—and are hell bent on stemming the financial crisis the backs of the afore mentioned usual suspects.

Hoping you will forget (and apparently you have) that their Republican predecessors—starting with Saint Ronnie—engineered this "debt crisis."

Commentary: The only conclusion I can come to—this Democratic Republic called America—is doomed to succumb to the excesses of a small group of super greedy self-serving plutocrats (that's "very rich fat cats for all you Tea Baggers"), with the help of every corrupt amoral politician that has sold out his constituency, and a mentally lazy and complacent "dittohead" electorate. If “Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance” then the average conservative voter is blissfully ignorant and deserves to live under the heel of the new fascist American aristocracy. They already own all the worlds resources they may as well own your dumb asses too.

BREAKING NEWS: They are still looting the Social Security Fund of its 2.3 trillion dollar surplus, behind closed doors, and they want to blame it on the deficit crisis. The reason they are telling everyone its broke is they've been stealing from it since Reagan came into office—and there is nothing left except a bunch of worthless I.O.U.s—and they now see a away to cover their asses with this phony debt reduction blitz before the public finds out the truth and lynches them. And they have the balls to lecture Afghanistan about corruption. But, then what can we expect from Republicans who—for example—claim their marital infidelity was inspired by their "intense passion" for America. I'm not making this shit up. I can only imagine that their ardor is aroused when the see the exposed backsides of the American taxpayer. I wonder who they will try an hump next? Union workers maybe? Naaaah, they wouldn't do that!

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