Oh boy! Ohboyoboyoboyoboy! Just when you think you have heard every lie, every phony claim, every stinking innuendo, every slavish following of the superstitiously silly, wretchedly excessive Rich Right Wing of the Oligarchic Obstructive Republican Party…you get another surprise.
Saturday morning, June 26, 2010, the Republicans, and their new puppet, Paul Ryan, an embarrassment to all Irish everywhere, laid out their most hypocritical and evil scheme yet to try to bamboozle the American people.
One is reluctant to use the term “evil” but the fact is that when you deliberately hurt someone that you have the power to help rather than hurt…that is evil. You don’t need to be a Christian or a Mormon or a Quaker or a practicing Roman Catholic or a devout Jew or a dedicated Muslim to figure that out. It is what you call your basic morality.
As you can hear if you can listen to Ryan’s message on the video below, the Republicans want you to believe that we have achieved an “unprecedented budget collapse.” He says that the Democrats have “canceled the budget” to “continue their “spending spree.”
Wow. That sounds pretty serious. But actually, the Democrats can’t cancel a budget, can they? I mean, you can say that you are or are not on a budget with your household expenses, but you can’t cancel paying your mortgage or you will be out on the street. You can’t cancel eating or you won’t need to worry about budgets. What Ryan means is that the Democrats have stopped trying to deal with Republicans who won’t participate in government.
The Democrats have initiated something again, something that they had under Clinton, but something that Bush and Cheney cancelled the day that they walked through the door. It is called “paygo” and it means that the Democrats will not spend any money that they cannot replace with cuts to the budget. And they have been doing that.
So Democrats are providing “no budgets, no priorities and no restraints.” But is that true? If you can’t spend any more than you can cut…isn’t that a restraint? Perhaps what Mr. Ryan is talking about is the fact that the Republicans want to cut the budget and only want to talk about cutting the budget, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Now that would seem like suicide for someone like Mr. Ryan, who must have at least some rational middle-class farmers and workers in his district. They can’t all be households with over $250,000 in income. These are the people who have done very well in the last 8 years and these are the people that the President and Congress are asking to share in the responsibility now.
Mr. Ryan’s and the Republican Party’s constituents, the millionaires, made out very well under the Bush tax cuts. You will see that household incomes of $1,000,000 and over received a tax cut—just the cut, not the taxes—of $120,000 per million and per year. So the minimum they could have received over the life of the Bush tax cuts was $1,200,000. Some prudent people could retire on that after-tax amount alone.
Ryan says that our national debt is on track to exceed the size of our entire economy in the next 18 months…his words. Our national debt is $13 trillion, which is a lot. But our Gross National Product is $17 trillion or more.
Not only that, but the $13 trillion, except for $800 billion, was amassed over the entire period of the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton (the first few years), and Bush, Jr. Administrations. This next year, if we can begin to get the economy under control, it will be $13.5 trillion, then the next year $14 trillion, and so on. Not $17 trillion, which, of course is misleading because, just like a car or a house, you don’t have to pay it all back in one year.
The way President Clinton reduced the national debt…and he did…was to expand the economy. He RAISED taxes on the RICH a little bit, and he created a strong domestic economy. He created 22 million jobs, (Bush created 3 million) and cut back on government spending…with paygo…and the—then—cooperation of the Republican Congress, only too glad to try to cut back Democratic spending in those days.
As soon as Bush and Ryan and their pals came in spending went through the roof. Ryan is, yes, a hypocrite. You will notice that he says the Democrats plan to tax the middle class. Well, of course, there may be some taxes somewhere in some bill, but the main point is that there are no INCOME TAXES on the middle class with household incomes of under $250,000, which is the bottom 90% or so (without looking it up…but it is very few as a percentage of total households.)
You will notice that Ryan didn’t talk about taxes. He did not say anything about the fact that the net revenues of the U.S. Treasury last year were the lowest since 1950 when we only had about a third of the population that we have now. He didn’t talk about taxing those mentioned above who got the huge benefits of Bush tax breaks or the corporations like EXXON who made $40 billion…profits of $40 billion and paid no taxes. Zero taxes.
This isn’t about who pays taxes and who doesn’t or who pays too much or who pays too little. This is about a Republican government that cut taxes from the 74% top marginal rate that it was before Reagan down to a 28% top rate. Can a family live as well on $28,000 as they did on $74,000?
It isn’t even economics. It is basic common sense. They through government into a tail spin starting in the early 1980s, promising that lower taxes would create much more revenues…which it factually never did. Never. The Republicans chirped about increased revenues. Of course. The country went from a population of 250 million to a population of 300 million and a work force of 85 million to a workforce of 114 million.
Hello! But the costs of managing a government for those increase populations also went up. It was not increased revenues from lower taxes. It was increased tax revenues from more people coming into the workforce and being taxed. The revenues never caught up to the cost of running a government. Deficits ran an average of about $250 billion, even got up to something like $500 billion for a time under George Bush the First. Deficits went from under a trillion to well over $2 trillion just by the end of Reagan and doubled under Bush One.
So this little twerp with his calculator, Paul Ryan, is not going to come on television like some oracle and begin to lecture people like Robert Reich or Paul Krugman or Robert Kuttner or Brad DeLong or Dean Baker or Jamie Galbraith or, for God’s sake, Joe Stiglitz…and say that we need to CUT government spending. This latest version of a Tom DeLay is just one more Republican hypocrite, in a new suit, going door-to-door carrying the same old bundle of brushes that we tried once and they didn’t clean up anything. They only make things worse.
The Bush Administration left us with two problems. The Republicans will only admit to one. They will admit that they, the Republican controlled Congress…not Bush…executed the legislative program that cut government revenues, started enormously expensive wars and created government spending, like the $275 million that Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas gave away to businesses in his California territory just as he was retiring to return there. How well do you think he was welcomed, that spineless, disgusting hypocrite?
They wrote the legislation and spent the money that created an additional $7 trillion dollars in debt. Then they left President Obama both an additional $1.3 trillion first year deficit and an economy that was shedding jobs at 700,000 a month. That caused another $1.8 trillion in spending just to keep us out of a Depression.
Now Ryan and the Republicans complain that the Democrats should be “creating more jobs, not more debt.” More jobs? Let’s see. More jobs than the 3 million they created in the same number of years that Clinton created 22 million? The same number of jobs at the same rate that they were being created when Obama took over from the Republicans…losing 700,000 a month?
Or the number of jobs that the private financial sector has created? Remember the Wall Street crowd? We loaned them $700 billion. They came back from the brink created by their own greed and stupidity and have not created one single job. Not one single job. Six financial institutions hold assets equivalent to 63% of the entire economy. And yet they cannot create one single job.
As a result of the final year of the Bush tax cuts, the family of the first multi-billionaire to die under the 2010 Inheritance Tax policy has just received all his wealth….tax free. People who did nothing to create or earn or advance this fortune are now handed it with no federal taxes.
On this day, Republicans celebrated this victory over the middle class, on their way, they assume to a comfortable plutocracy or totalitarian or corporatist society beginning this fall. That is why they could send a lightweight, a relative child like Ryan to make their speech for them, foolish statements if examine with even the most cursory check of facts.
On the same day, the Republicans voted down the adoption of a bill that would have kept Medicare general practitioners from receiving a 21% pay cut and keeping 1 million American workers from receiving unemployment benefits. By the way, that bill would have cost the government $3 billion. The defense department spends that much in about four days.
There are five applicants for every job, thanks to the Republican hands-off policies of running the economy for the last 8 years. Yet Republicans would filibuster, the 290th filibuster of only this session…to create this kind of misery.
Senator Scott Brown, the brain-dead new Senator from the less-civilized than we knew state of Massachusetts ridiculed Senator Harry Reid for calling him “four times within 12 minutes” to beg him to vote to keep people on unemployment rolls. Brown, to his shame and shallowness, did not recognize and acknowledge the valiant effort of one man, even a U.S. Senator, to do everything possible to help his fellow man.
Do you see why we use such antagonistic rhetoric against Republicans like Mr. Ryan who would try to make us believe that the Republicans…the Republicans…are the ones concerned about the “hardworking American family?”
Joe Barton and Steve King and others in Congress think that the people of Louisiana can go to hell so long as BP oil is taken care of. They are outraged that we would make a negligent oil company, one making profits of $18 billion a year pay $20 billion for a cleanup and total economic devastation of an area that will cost at least twice that much.
In closing, Mr. Ryan says that he wants to cut the size of government, “And let’s all do it together.” What a concept. Working together. Mr. Ryan, the Republican stooge, this week’s Pinocchio the Republican, doesn’t actually believe that will happen, does he, after 290 vetoes of legislation for the People have been exercised by the Republicans?
No, he doesn’t. Ryan is a hypocrite and an embarrassment for the state that gave us Robert LaFollette.
