Republican Budget Plan – Page 2

Monday Wake-Up Call – October 19, 2015

Page A21 of Friday’s New York Times carried the news that our budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30th was $439 billion, or $44 billion less than the prior year, and nearly $1 trillion less than its peak during the Great Recession. Oh, and it equaled just 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Wall Street Journal reported that the budget shortfall was 9% lower than last year, and at its lowest level since 2007.

If the “paper of record” buries this story, don’t expect to see it on the nightly news, or the Sunday bloviator shows. Yet, it was not very long ago that the media was obsessed with the budget deficit, egged on by Republicans who returned incessantly to Talking Points 101 from their slash Social Security and Medicare playbook . The WSJ provides a history of recent deficits:

The surplus on the top graph occurred during the Clinton administration. That would be about the same time that “spending” began exceeding “revenue” on the second graph.

The budget deficit is less of a problem than it has been since 2007, and since our economy is larger, it is also even less as a share of US GDP. Indeed, at 2.5% of GDP, our current deficit is less than the average of the past 40 years. The increase in tax receipts from higher tax rates, an improving economy (and stock market), combined with marginal cuts in federal spending (the Sequester) have all helped drop the deficit by almost 75% from its 2009 high.

So the deficit is falling, but the total debt of the US government is still increasing.

The debt is the total amount of money the US government owes. It’s the amount borrowed to cover all the deficits over the years. When the fiscal year ended on September 30, the US government owed $13.124 trillion to the public (a measure that includes Treasury securities held by the Federal Reserve.) To see the current tally, see the Treasury’s “The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It” website.

To increase our debt, we have to increase the debt ceiling. But, once again, Congress can’t agree to increase the debt ceiling unless the Tea party faction of the Republican Party can score a few political points about Medicare, Social Security and Planned Parenthood.

Why does the Beltway media continue to fall for the Republican trope that they are the fiscally prudent party? We now have 35 years and five Presidents of proof that Republican Presidents spend like teenagers with their parents’ credit card.

But the “meh, so what?” emoji from the Beltway media after we cut $1 trillion from the deficit is truly disappointing. So today’s wake up is for the media who think that cutting the deficit is a low value target for our collective consciousness.

Today’s Wake Up is “For What It’s Worth”. Even though it is associated with Vietnam and Kent State, it isn’t an anti-war song. It was written about the “Sunset Strip riots” in November, 1966. From Wikipedia:

On one evening, 1,000 demonstrators gathered to protest against the enforcement of the curfew laws. Although the rallies began peacefully, trouble eventually broke out among the protesters and police. The unrest continued the next night and periodically throughout the rest of November and December forcing some clubs to shut down within weeks.

Here are Buffalo Springfield with “For What Its Worth”:

50 years later, this song is still relevant. That speaks to the song’s genius.

Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for our media and politicians.

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 17, 2015

The “knowing what we know now” argument from the right wing talkers was all over the news this week. They are trying to help Jeb Bush walk back his brother’s decision to invade Iraq. It is a revisionist attempt to explain the past decisions of the Bush administration with the added benefit of indicting Hillary Clinton. After all, while a Senator from NY she voted to invade.

The reframe says that a decision based on “what we knew then” was righteous, that everyone who looked at the same information would have come to the same decision. These guys continue to defend the invasion, despite the fact that we know it was based on lies. Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option.

They decided before the dust of 9/11 had settled to use it as an excuse to go after Saddam. As evil as he was, he had nothing to do with the attack. To make a case for the short little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and insinuating that Saddam was behind 9/11. From Lambert Strether:

And we played whack-a-mole with one fake WMD story after another: The yellowcake. The drones. The white powder. Judy Miller. Curveball. Cheney at the CIA. As soon as we would whack one story, another would pop up. And then Colin Powell, bless his heart, went to the UN and regurgitated it all (to his subsequent regret). Only subsequently did we come to understand (from the Downing Street Memo) that “the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy,” and that the reason it felt like we were playing whack-a-mole is that we were; Bush’s “White House Iraq Group” was systematically planting stories in our famously free press.

Yet the Neo-cons, including Jeb Bush, say they would still make the same decision.

Bush harkens back to a government that believed its own spin doctoring to the point where it wasn’t able to see the difference between a sales pitch and the hard evidence coming from the Intelligence community. Given the totality of the outcome of these decisions: America nearly bankrupted, hundreds of thousands dead, total conflagration in the Middle East, he spent the week dancing around, saying the intelligence was faulty, but everyone believed it. And saying while you wouldn’t do it now, you would have done it then, is moral depravity.

According to the neo-cons, Obama did it:

Jeb mansplains:

This week, Obama met with our ME “allies”:

Amtrak off the rails indicts America:

GOP’s new budget is springtime for the 1%:

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

Trade Deal is still up in the air:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 5, 2015

What a week! An Iran deal that may lead nowhere, or that may be a reset on our Middle East adventure, and continued blowback on the anti-gay, pro-religious bigotry legislation in Indiana and Arkansas. Couple these things with Easter and Passover, and you have a jam-packed weekend in America.

Easter is a good time to talk about “Homeless Jesus”. It is a sculpture by Timothy P. Schmalz that depicts a homeless person sleeping on a park bench, with holes in his feet. Schmaltz, a Catholic, says that Homeless Jesus is intended as a visual reminder of the passage in the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus tells his disciples,

As you did to one of the least of my brothers, you did unto me.

Here is the statue:

Several casts of the original are installed in the US, Europe and Canada. In Davidson, NC where the photo above was taken in 2014, a woman actually called police the first time she drove by; she thought it was an actual homeless person. Obviously, the irony was lost on her, or maybe she was just more comfortable with a Jesus-as-crucified statue.

Politics deals with power in society, and in the last 50 years, we have made economic class a sub-category of our politics. America’s rampant homelessness goes straight to the heart of the Christian message. Some Republicans should reflect on why they insist on objectifying people (think Mitt’s 47% comment), when we should be helping them as humans in need. Now, it is possible to materially help someone while still objectifying them. From a Christian viewpoint, this is morally wrong.

Link that thought to the current Republican budget. Their planned social safety net cuts are ruinous. Those in need include people with disabilities, under-fed children, abused women, the mentally ill, veterans, and oh yes, the working poor.

When you hear politicians who would deny these funds because “My taxes might go up”, we should ask, what part of Christian teachings, and where on the moral spectrum, do these ideas come from?

So, on to the cartoons of the week.

Jesus takes the fall for Republicans in Indy:

Republicans retreat to revise legislation after hearing from the Big Guy:

Iran deal is framed in eye of the beholder:

Johnny Volcano doesn’t like Iran announcement:

Easter eggs may contain better message this year:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 29, 2015

The Republican-controlled House and Senate have each passed budgets for the coming Fiscal Year. The Senate plan seeks $5.1 trillion in domestic spending cuts over 10 years while boosting military funding.

Each budget plan derives more than two-thirds of its non-defense budget cuts from programs for people with low or modest incomes, even though these programs constitute less than one-quarter of federal program costs. One question needs to be asked: Why do Republicans insist on passing legislation that they know Mr. Obama will veto, rather than attempting to draft more palatable and bipartisan proposals (something that actually has a chance of passing) rather than grid-locking all government functions?

The newest Senate budget plan repeals Obamacare, since it’s working pretty well. Their budget guts Medicare and turns it into a voucher-driven private insurance program (another gift to the health-care industry). It cuts back even farther on Medicaid and food stamps; but, it provides a nice tax break to the highest-paid Americans, who don’t deserve a break today. It is evident to anyone who reads that Republicans do not want to eliminate Medicare nor reduce government.

What they want is to privatize it to make their donors even richer than what they are. This budget is similar to what Wisconsin and Kansas both have tried. You could check and see how their economies have tanked as a result of following discredited trickle-down Republican ideology. Now, for a few cartoons to provide some levity to an otherwise bad week.

Republicans give more $Billions to Pentagon than it asks for: