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What’s the Teabaggers’ main gripe? What do they hope to accomplish? Putz’s op-ed in today’s New York Post finally answers that question.
In the short run, this is likely to provide at least a bit of resistance to the borrow-and-spend-like-there’s-no-tomorrow approach that now governs Washington.
Ah-ha! So it’s deficits the Teabaggers object to. Good. Let’s take a look at the biggest borrowers-and-spenders over the past 40 years.
That’s right, not only are the worst offenders Republicans, the notion that deficits are something that Obama and Pelosi invented is laughable.
I know, I know OBAMA’S BUDGET IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE BIGGEST WASTE EVER GENERATIONAL THEFT!!11!11!!!
Turns out Ronald Reagan was the biggest Generational Thief in history.
The fiscal shift in the Reagan years was staggering. In January 1981, when Reagan declared the federal budget to be "out of control," the deficit had reached almost $74 billion, the federal debt $930 billion. Within two years, the deficit was $208 billion. The debt by 1988 totaled $2.6 trillion. In those eight years, the United States moved from being the world’s largest international creditor to the largest debtor nation.
No doubt, when this is brought to their attention, the Teabaggers will stop dry-humping Reagan’s coffin and declare him a failed President.
And what about George W. Bush, who they cheered on for 8 years and who remained hugely popular with them when he left office?
The White House has increased its estimate for next year’s deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office, a report due out Monday shows.
…
The rising deficit for 2009 marks a sharp turnaround for Bush’s fiscal legacy. He inherited a $128 billion surplus when he came into office in 2001.
Here’s some advice for Putz and the Teabaggers: find a cause celebre that makes you look less like a bunch of transparently partisan hypocritical historically-ignorant assholes.
Related posts:
- Chris Matthews Pwns Reagan-Worshipping Tea Party Leader
- Doug Hoffman’s Cunning Plan to Reduce the Deficit: Cutting Earmarks, Taxes
- Baucus Bill Automatically Cuts Exchange Subsidies to Avoid Early Year Deficits
- Obama’s Budget: “New Foundation for Lasting Growth,” or Old-Style Tax Cuts and Military Spending?
- James Galbraith on How Government Deficits Saved Us and Are Still Needed
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Running up huge deficits, like everything else, is OK if you’re a Republican.
Greetings from FL, Blue Texan!
oh..ZED!
Oh, BT, such hate-filled speech! I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
frederic’s not gonna like it.
Great title; but just to add that Republicans are allowed to run up deficits provided they spend that $$ on weapons, missile systems, financial ‘instruments’ that include offshoring profits, and anything that requires extensive use of gas or oil.
Budgets….what’s to worry. The big Laura worry today is that Obama appeared at the WH Easter Egg hunt without (gasp) a coat and tie; but more. There was a mike that did not work at first!! What have we come to? Has she lamented 1000s of dead Iraqis? Or the President who lied us into war? You tell me.
Don’t go confusing the teabaggers with a bunch of factual data.
the Teabaggers will stop dry-humping Reagan’s coffin and declare him a failed President.
Hahahahaha! The sexual deviance of those teabaggers…
It’s not really about deficits, of course. It’s about how money is spent. Teabaggers are happy to let bridges collapse, cities drown, and flu vaccine to become rationed, but that’s all okay as long as Halliburton is paid handsomely for electricuting our soldiers embroiled in foreign wars.
Its the democrats fault, dammit. Cus, I duunno, dammit. Teabag?
A message I would like to send to every Republican in America, regardless of extremism quotient.
I don’t understand the concern about deficits now. It is like John Maynard Keynes never existed.
Especially if they’re going to base all of this corporate-funded outrage on deficit spending.
I’ll see your collapsed infrastructure and raise you. This teabagging “movement” is just another product that Fox can use to attract advertisers. Jane lays it out rather nicely downstairs. This isn’t about fiscal responsibility, or policy, or principles.
It’s about sales.
Nice Rovian Reversal, though I hear memory loss is the first sign of dementia.
Mr. Bush spent like a drunken sailor spending his entire ship’s company’s pay, never his own. He set up this bail-out, which Obama continues with ideologically identical staff. He started our wars with no clue how to end them. He tore up the Treasury’s income sheet with his tax cuts, and increased substantially the demands on its reduced income. He hollowed out federal agencies by cutting their budgets, appointing lobbyists to run them, and by firing or ostracizing staff who weren’t “with the program”.
The idea that it is Democrats who are spending like there’s no tomorrow should be publicly laughed off the airwaves. It’s where the money goes that counts. Subsidizing the rich gives us fewer, richer overlords. If we don’t spend on education, health care, appropriate infrastructure, and jobs for tomorrow, there won’t be one.
Irony and stupidity collide to form a hypocritical mass of ideological unreality…
Seriously, the idea that “government is the problem…”, is not conservativism-that is oligarchical radicalism, IMO.
Off Topic:
The Duggar function is now exponential
http://www.nydailynews.com/lif…..cting.html
Anyone who buys that “government is the problem…” Reaganism should hold up Somalia as the ideal, right?
Keynes doesn’t exist to establishment economists.
Mary runs from the room screaming “Can’t we put something in their water?”
The scary thing is that the teabaggers who believe that government is the problem are snatching up guns…They want to be the warlords of our land.
I love your first paragraph. How better to insure that Yep, Gov’ment don’t work.
Very nice comparison. The Somalian government is running like a finely-tuned machine, right?
They had them already, take that to the bank.
Yeah, but it sounds like they’re building up their arsenals lately.
Oh yea.
It is simply really. A black democrat is running the country. This calls for revolution in the little minds of the teabaggers. They are dangerous. The republicans are using them to create chaos. The republicans are treasonous and violent.
Obama is budgeting for a $2 Trillion dollar deficit.
And blasting Bush over deficit spending.
Gaddayum, talk about irrational.
I think we’re likely to see the federal debt hit $20T before the end of Obama’s first term. This is more than 100% of GDP, but with luck the stimulus and other policies will have GDP increasing again – a $20T debt with a $15T economy will be better than a $20T debt and a $12T economy by quite a bit.
Longer term it is worth working to reduce the overall federal debt. Which means tax increases. As a progressive I think more taxes on the “top 1% that pay 30% of all taxes” is appropriate. Transaction taxes on securities could pay back the bailout debt. Increasing the Medicare payroll tax to pay for universal health care. Removing the income cap on FICA payroll tax to increase low earner’s Old Age and Survivors benefits.
Co-workers report today that gun prices are going up as is ammunition and that ammo is in very short supply.
OT somebody tell the two bobbleheads on MSNBC right now that Gephardt is speaking against universal healthcare because he’s a lobbyist who’s paid to.
Ahhhh, wait, John Harwood alludes to his Big Corp ties…. could it be there’ll actually be responsible reporting instead of spin-regurgitation?
Stay tuned….
Republicans are only allowed to run up deficits provided that money flows into the hands of their familes and their cronies. That’s why they now have switched back to being deficit hawks. They can’t contol the flow of money.
If only Obama was born in England and wore a long, red coat …
Actually, FreedomWorks called for Americans to take to the streets against the stimulus on Feb. 9th.
See: http://www.freedomworks.org/pr…..bama-in-fo
and: http://www.freedomworks.org/pr…..sure-3-rep
Ronald Regan was the greatest president ever. he launched th US on a new trajectory of success, after the miserable failure of the Carter days, with Americans taken hostage by Iran, and failed to get the hostages back. Regan, with his skilled and effective team, got the hostages back, and engaged the Iranians in profitable trade, until a Democrat congress shut down this profitable business, and brilliant foreign policy, with a unparalleled witch hunt.
The teabaggers, create our own reality. We do not believe these “so called” facts, and know that Clinton ran a secret deficit under the desk in the Oval Orifice.
I respectfully submit that we not get all tore up about this.
Its NEVER been about deficits, its ALWAYS been about what the money is spent on, i.e., republicans have no problems with huge deficits as long as the money is going to line the pockets of their rich plutocratic constituents. Hence obscene and ever ballooning military spending is no problem, but universal healthcare and social security are; TARP is no problem, but stimulus spending for food stamps, education, unemployment compensation, infrastructure investment, etc. is. Whenever the money goes to helping non-wealthy Americans, republicans/conservatives have a huge problem with deficits.
It is both difficult and expensive to clean up after Bush and the Republics.
Really?
Bush’s FY 2009 budget deficit is already over $900B and we’re only half way through FY 2009. Bush also made a point of not including war spending in his accounting, understating his deficits by $200B or more each year.
Right now we’re in a bad spot that requires either immense suffering or herculean government spending. It isn’t irrational to choose the spending while still lamenting the useless debt incurred by W.
How’s this for irrational:
GOP = Greedy Old party.
And government jobs aren’t real jobs but if you cut the defense budget you are costing Americans jobs. That’s what you really smart people call a “meme”.
Not here.
somehow I knew that :)
The one that gets me is when they talk about the Great Depression.
How was necessary spending to destroy a bunch of European and Asian infrastructure and kill massive numbers of productive people world wide good for the economy?
Spending to assure people had dignified lives after retirement and improve the infrastructure of the US was wasteful and ineffective?
Borrowing after WWII to rebuild Europe and Japan was good for the economy.
Is there a reason why there’s no column for Bush 43 2nd (term) in the second graph? Not that I doubt that it’s within the rest of the Reps in terms of the debt, but it seems a little strange to cite the value for that term in the first graph (debt/GDP), and not the second.
My guess is that the chart was done a few years ago, prior to the end of Bush II 2nd term
“the Teabaggers will stop dry-humping Reagan’s coffin…”
PLEASE, can we see that in a Horsey cartoon???
Bush 43 2nd term budget is partly responsible for FY 2009 is my guess. He owns a pretty big chunk of the $2T deficit this fiscal year.
I think “teabagging” is what the Rethugs have been doing to each other for a long time.
http://www.urbandictionary.com