Friday, July 8, 2011

Republican Sabotage of the Economy

Ever since Obama took office, major Republicans said quite openly and aggressively that they hoped Obama would fail.  From that day forward, they have been the most obstructionist group of politicians in many years.  Now that they have gotten control of the House, they are successfully implementing their plan of complete and utter economic failure.  Republicans keep asking where the jobs are, but they utterly fail to understand that jobs requires economic growth, which usually requires government stimulus.  The Republican theory is that companies won't hire because they are concerned about our debt.  So, what do they do, they hijack the debt ceiling as if that is something that controls our debt.  It doesn't.  The debt ceiling allows us to pay back our existing debt.  This is money that the government has already spent and is not tied to future spending.  By leaving elements of our economy doubting whether or not the US will meet its financial obligations is preventing job growth.  So, the Republicans have successfully managed to manufacture the necessary fear to make it appear Obama is failing, when it reality, history has shown that increase in spending to generate economic growth will do far more to reduce the future deficit by increasing revenue.

Steve Benen has a great blog post this morning on just this thing and has been advocating the position that the Republicans have no interest in seeing the economy improve prior to next year's election.

There other maddening thing the Republicans are doing is their insistence on no revenue increases.  Here is a chart that shows Reagan, of all people, proposed a deal that was 75% revenue increases.  Recent history does show that tax increases has actually spurred economic growth and that tax cuts, especially the Bush tax cut from 2001 does not provide the magic fairy dust trickle down economics that they think it does.

The Republicans are fucking with us in the worst possible way.

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