From what I’ve seen of Democratic presidents during my lifetime, they may want to do everything they promised, but when confronted with facts and numbers they will accept reality and act responsibly with respect to the budget. That may mean scaling back their plans, making cuts in other parts of the budget, shifting the tax burden, or possibly even raising taxes (including mine). I’m okay with that. I want this country to be around for a long time, and to be on a sound financial footing.
I have no similar faith in Republicans. They promise to bring down the deficit and I know they won’t do it.
Funny that your cite says it came from a minority of the Senate Budget Committee, not the Congressional Budget Office.
I have no doubt that you thought the cite was objective, but that’s much of the problem.
“Spin from your side is clearly false, spin from my side is unassailable truth” is hardly limited to one side or the other.
So no actual rebuttal to the fact that Republicans increase spending at a faster rate than Democrats, who have ACTUALLY reduced spending in the last twenty years, despite Republican claims to the opposite?
It’s rather odd for someone to claim a source (mostly credible) the CBO says something, and then when told that it actually wasn’t said source, you want to start arguing about what the report may ‘mean’.
I mean, you kinda lost that high ground from the get go, no?
Would you rather have increased spending and a balanced budget, or flat spending a trillion dollar deficit? And you can’t say “neither,” those are the only two options in our current political climate.
There’s a problem with large scale policy, in that at some level the small sample size leaves everything open to interpretation. So when Kansas implements Republican policies full-bore and suffers catastrophic budget shortfalls as a result, Republicans can just shrug and say whatever they want. “Sure things are bad, but they would have been much worse if the Democrats were in charge.” “Yes, these specific Republicans didn’t do a good job, but the next batch I vote in will implement those same policies better, and we won’t have these problems.” Etc, etc.
It’s a convenient way to ignore obvious conclusions. “Yes, we’ve elected Democrats in the past and they seem to have been better about being fiscally responsible, but these next generation of Democrats are going to blow up the budget! Just you wait!”
The report explains the methodology and the sources from which the information was gathered, including the Congressional Budget Office. If you think there’s anything about it that’s factually incorrect, by all means say so.
Personally, I’m amazed they could track trillions of dollars of Republican-caused debt and not even bother to mention Medicare Part D; another policy they passed with no attempt to pay for.
The Republican congresses of the late 1990s were constrained by a long-term plan put in place by Democrats in the early 1990s. As soon as Republicans held the presidency again, they got rid of the constraints and surpluses turned back into deficits.
I think you said upthread that you find this unpersuasive. Would you care to elaborate on exactly why?
I’m not particularly well informed about the Tea Party movement in general (I thought Ted Cruz was a Tea Party member, but I was wrong), but your conclusion needs more support. Just because Rush Limbaugh says “nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore”, doesn’t mean Tea Party members never cared about debt or fiscal conservatism. It is possible that the members have simply left Congress, thus the movement lost its significance. It is possible that Mr. Limbaugh is wrong. Presumably Mr. Limbaugh himself is still a fiscal conservative, and he meant “nobody” in a figurative sense, as if referring to some zeitgeist of fiscal conservatism.
Ideally I would look at a list of current/former Tea Party members and their published opinions and voting record. Then we can look at the numbers and discuss whether the movement overall is comprised of hypocrites. The substantive debate would be whether an individual member is a hypocrite, based on their actions.
That’s my opinion, anyways. I don’t see why we are talking about Democrats at all in this thread.
The suggestion is that when the Tea Party, and Republicans in general, say they want to lower the deficit, that it’s a misplaced or expedient way to attack Democrats, rather than a principle that they consistently uphold. As an explanation for the Tea Party’s silence now, it does seem relevant.
The budget deal to which I believe you are referring was an effort to get Bush 41 to break his “read my lips” pledge and raise taxes. It was an agreement by Democrats to raise taxes now, and cut spending later. (The “later” never happened.) Then Clinton was elected, and his first act was an attempt to increase the budget deficit by $16B based on his assertion that we were in a recession and needed the stimulus. (He was lying, as is probably not necessary to point out - we were not in recession.) The GOP was able to defeat this, although they were not in control of Congress. Then, some time later, the GOP regained control of Congress, and balanced the budget. Clinton vetoed this, but was overridden. (His budgets saw $200B deficits as far as the eye could see.) So, funnily enough, the long-term plan by Democrats didn’t balance the budget until after they lost control of Congress and the Democratic President’s vetoes were overridden.
Then, as you say, Bush 43 took office, and the deficit reappeared. This was in response to the recession that resulted from 9/11 and the popping of the dot-com bubble. According to the logic, deficits are OK in a recession, except, apparently, unless a Republican is in the White House. And once the recession is over, the deficits should be reduced. Which they did, under Bush 43. But again, apparently that logic doesn’t work when a Republican is in the White House.
And again, when the Bush era tax cuts were allegedly no longer needed, and the Democrats controlled Congress, and did not need to do anything to let the cuts expire - just sit still and let them. Yet that is not what the Democratically-controlled Congress did - they voted to extend them.
See also the stuff about the “Republican policy” of the war in Afghanistan, which Quicksilver mischaracterized as coming from the CBO when it was actually Democratic spin. The war in Afghanistan was authorized with bipartisan support. Democrats later regained control of the White House and Congress, and voted to continue to fund it. Yet the spin is that it is all Republicans’ fault. That’s why it’s spin.
So yes, “no matter what, it’s never the Democrats’s fault and the Obama tax cuts that no Republican voted for don’t count and all the Democratic front-runners have said explicitly they will increase spending but don’t believe them and vote for them because they won’t do what they say and the tax increases that won’t cover what they will spend will cover what they spend” is unpersuasive.