They keep producing the “extraordinary circumstances”, and then pass on the burden of recovery to the next administration. If the next administration is Republican, then they slash spending to social programs and attack healthcare programs AND give tax cuts to their wealthy buddies. If it’s a Democratic administration, they point fingers at how spending is out of control, but never acknowledge that they created the problem in the first place. When have Republicans ever reduced deficits through spending reductions? They “tend to believe” that it will happen? I laugh in your general direction.
Borrowing billions or trillions from China to fight a discretionary war is hardly “necessary” or “temporary”, and they are presently in whine mode about how the current administration isn’t reducing Republican-incurred debt fast enough. Fuck their tight asses with a toothpick.
I agree that this is probably the story Republicans tell themselves to justify their own spending habits, but the facts don’t bear it out. Bush proposed big tax cuts in response to a surplus, then kept two wars off the books and expanded Medicare and never proposed undoing the taxes or doing anything else to raise more money, and his own VP said it was fine because nobody cared about deficits. Despite big changes in the country’s financial situation during his term that made the tax cuts a huge contributor to the deficit, he never proposed altering the tax cuts. The philosophy was “if the economy is good, you cut taxes; if it’s bad, you cut taxes.” We’re actually now in the kind of extraordinary circumstance where it makes sense to run a deficit - with help from the stimulus package we’ve avoided a depression but the economy is still not great, and the government should be spending money to help keep the economy going - but the Republicans are now obsessed with the deficit and their prescription is cuts in federal spending, throwing people out of work by eliminating jobs with the federal government, and cutting taxes again. No matter what kind of combination of spending cuts and specific tax increases the Democrats propose, they won’t do it, which indicates they’re not serious about the deficit. From a fiscal philosophy point of view it makes no sense at all. It only works if you’ve run out of other ideas and have decided the deficit is your best political weapon.
That’s easy - 9/11, WMD’s, and needing to get senior citizen votes. And tax cuts where the overwhelming beneift would be to the middle and lower classes.
Well perhaps you should move to the good old U.S. of A., where we don’t have a government like the one you describe. In fact, you may not be aware of it, but people felt so strongly about needing recourse against government that we wrote it into our constitution:
If you guys want to know why conservatives seem to think the way they do, I can tell you…at least to a certain degree, as I don’t speak for us all. But just like with politicians on your side, our guys don’t always do what we’d want them to do. But it’s the difference in philosophy as I described it that accounts for the reason why conservatives seem less concerned about Republican deficits than Democrat deficits. Conservatives know their guys aren’t motivated by a strong desire to increase taxes at every opportunity and have to trust, as much as is possible in a representative form of government, that their guys will vote and act accordingly. However, it’s not for nothing that Congress has a 14% or whatever it is approval rating, and lots of stuff gets done by the people running this govenment that most of its people don’t like. And that applies to Republicans every bit as much as it does to Democrats.
What you’re actually describing is best known as “making up excuses” (and yes, that behavior is common in people of all political persuasions). If Republicans run a huge deficit and spend like there’s no tomorrow, it’s because there were extraordinary circumstances and they were going to get around to fixing it sooner or later even if they never made the slightest move to do so. If a Democrat does it, it’s because of socialist collectivist enslavement to the welfare state. You’re saying people judge the same behavior differently based on the presumed or projected motivations of the people doing it. And that’s probably true a lot of the time, but it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
I’m a guy on the other side, and I understand this feeling. I really do. My biggest disappointment with Obama is the deficit.
However, it’s time to face facts. As much as Republicans pay lip service to it, they never balance the budget. They reduce taxes, mumble something about the Laffer curve or growth, even though the evidence is clear about neither working, and the rich guys reward them. I can’t believe the brain trust behind Republican policy really believes they’re going to reduce taxes and spending and balance the budget. There’s too much reality that contradicts it.
The only way to balance the budget, so at least the debt doesn’t grow, is to let Bush 43’s tax cuts expire (and respectfully, there were no extraordinary circumstances behind those cuts).
I actually agree with most of this post. The problem here from the conservative point of view is that Democrats just aren’t trustworthy when it comes to taxation. The feeling is that if given free rein, the Democrats will increase taxes far more than necessary, use it for pork projects and other ways to buy votes, and that the new rates will become a permanent floor for future tax rates. We also don’t like the ever-increasing effort to shift the tax burden to the rich. We feel it is unfair, as our belief in individual responsibilty leads us to believe that everyone should pitch to help run the country no matter how modest their circumstances, and we feel it discourages the hard work, risk-taking, accomplishment and innovation that we all benefit from, with the result that we all end up clock-watching wage slaves surrounded by products and services created by the same.
Just was on foxnews . com and while I understand they are ® to the bone their front page stories about things Obama is doing wrong just screams desperate. One of their top stories is 10 Ways Obama’s childhood wasn’t “hard”. Really?
I’m suprised I didn’t see this story as a “Breaking News” banner at the top…
Only partly jokingly, I’ll say as demonstrated by Chicago/Cook County, Illinois. It’s effectively one-party rule, and the solution to many, many things seems to be more taxes.
Which is odd, because on this issue the Democrats have been consistent and upfront about what they want and Republicans change their focus whenever it’s convenient. The Democrats want a strong ‘safety net’ and support shifting more of the tax burden to rich people. Republicans want to be known as the fiscally responsible party, but they push for tax cuts regardless of the circumstances, don’t budget responsibly, say they want to cut the deficit they helped run up but that they won’t consider raising taxes under any circumstance, think deficits are more important than the broader state of the economy, and are in favor of putting large numbers of additional people out of work in a period of high unemployment. It’s a strategy chosen for political effectiveness, not fiscal sanity. So it’s not an issue of trustworthiness. It’s a simple lack of consistency.
They do: even Romney has had to start tempering that talking point because even people who don’t pay federal income tax pay other taxes, which sounds an awful lot like “pitching in.” And I am trying to refrain from making a joke about wanting everyone to “help run the country” while making it harder for the same people to vote.
The things I listed are already going on in this country. How you can say we don’t have one like I described is anybody’s guess.
But be that as it may, perhaps you haven’t noticed but only 14% of the populace is at least satisfied with the way the country is being run. The idea that we have any real input as to the direction the country moves in other than in the most general, ill-defined way is fiction. People are not happy with the way schools are being run and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re not happy with the way government is intruding on their personal product and diet choices and there is nothing they can do about it. They’re not happy with the way criminals in their late twenties are roaming the streets with multiple serious crimes on their rap sheets and there’s nothing they can do about it, etc., etc., etc.
Again, the idea that we decide how the government operates is a fiction. A happy fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
I agree. I’ve been fairly disappointed over the years with the way my guys have behaved once they got in power (this is to bup too). The trouble is, the alternative is a governing philosophy that strives to acheive what my guys are only stumbling into.
It only sounds like that to the uninformed. What those other taxes are doing is paying for specific programs, not the general functioning of the country.
I’m sure. But to be fair, those same people are the ones who want to be exempt from “helping run the country.” Sort of understandable in that light.
Then this isn’t a trust issue. Or at least not with regard to Democrats.
Yeah, to make that work you’ll have to redefine “pitch in.” Apparently it’s easier just to admit you’re talking about federal income taxes instead of pretending that huge numbers of people don’t pay any taxes.
Only if you think paying taxes and help run the country mean anything remotely similar (and are perhaps unaware about the legal status of poll taxes).
So that being said, I’d love to see where you’re getting the 14% number. Maybe I missed something. I honestly want to see where only 14% of people are satisfied with how this country is being run.
Has anyone ever stopped to think about how the greatest achievements of the United States – George Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s preserving the Union, Oppenheimer’s invention of the A-bomb, Reagan’s defense buildup, and yes, even JFK’s moon shot – were all accomplished by putting this country deeper into debt?
I refrained from pointing out at the end of my previous post that most of the ills I mentioned can be traced to some offshoot of liberal activism. I see that perhaps my consideration was misplaced.
Still, I don’t know. I think even some modern day liberals think it’s pretty stupid when a 13-year-old girl texts a photo of her boobs to a friend and gets charged with distributing child pornography, or when a kid gets sent home from school because he’s wearing Rosary beads, or when some dipstick mayor tries to deprive them of salt at a restaurant, or when their wives or daughters get raped or killed by some some asshole with rape and murder on his rap sheet and who is out of prison before he’s even thirty. Plus, I’d like to think, given the well-known fondness of liberals for schooling, that they’d prefer people at least be functional at reading and math by the time they graduate high school.
[GOP]
Nah, you don’t understand. Deficits don’t matter if the deficits stem from tax cuts, corporate welfare, farm subsidies, or spending on wars. Deficits matter if we’re talking about spending on programs that would benefit average citizens.
[/GOP]
But to be fair, those same people are the ones who want to be exempt from “helping run the country.” Sort of understandable in that light.