I find it increasingly difficult to stomach the lies, distortions and evasions of the leaders of the Conservative/Republican movement. Watching them dodge, weave and obfuscate when asked a direct simple question is at once laughable and horrific.
On Sunday's edition of Meet the Press Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was as preposterous as House Minority Leader John Boehner on the same show two weeks ago, blustering about having to account for how much extending the Bush tax cuts for the megarich – set to expire in 2011 -- will deepen the deficit. Just as Boehner sputtered and refused to answer repeatedly, then blamed "this Washington game and their funny accounting" for the vexing fact that protecting the megarich will add $3.2 trillion to the deficit, so did McConnell obfuscate. "Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, 'pay for'?" McConnell asked host David Gregory, calling the tax cuts "existing tax policy."
It's hard to believe the entire country doesn't remember (with outrage) that Republicans under George W. Bush didn't have the courage to make the tax cuts permanent when they passed them in 2001. Phasing the cuts out in 2011 masked the enormous hit to the federal budget, and also ensured the GOP could pass them via reconciliation, with a simple majority. (Remember how Bolshevik that idea was when the Democrats proposed using it for healthcare reform?)
I also don't understand why, if as the Republicans claim, these tax cuts are the secret to job growth, two Bush terms only saw the number of jobs grow by 1.1 million, when jobs grew by 22.7 million under Bill Clinton, at the same time that taxes on the rich were higher. And that's according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact.com, which fact-checked a Bush-Clinton job-growth comparison made by liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, and found he was wrong – he actually overestimated job growth under Bush.)
No comments:
Post a Comment