Look, Actual Grown-Up Republicans! They're Out There! They Live Among Us!

The more I think about it, the happier I am that I abandoned the fucking Republican Party over Schiavo. Anything that could be recommended about them was revealed to be an absolute fantasy by 2005. The idea that family health issues should be dealt with by the family, like they had been for about 4,000 years, and not Congress? Gone. The concept that they could fight a war without making America look ridiculous? Finished. Their concept of limited government is an illusion and always has been.

Maybe the longest-lasting and hardest to kill GOP fantasy is that they were somehow fiscally responsible. The truth is that the Republicans have at least been as monstrously irresponsible with money as have Democrats since 1980, and maybe more so.

It used to be that Republicans were against tax cuts when the country couldn't afford them. Indeed, both Eisenhower and Ford actually vetoed tax cut bills presented to them by Democratic congresses. Modern Republicans will never tell you this, but their predecessors actually opposed the Kennedy tax cut, going so far as to even block it until Kennedy himself was dead. Fiscal conservatives used to be against ill-advised tax cuts before they were for them. There was actually a time when Lyndon Johnson was actually afraid of presenting a $100 billion budget, so he juggled the numbers enough to make it $99.9 billion.

Of course, this was back in the good old days when somebody actually gave a shit about balanced budgets. What passes for fiscal conservatism these days is this stupid Cult of Reagan, which too often ignores reality. Among the things that assholes like Sarah Palin, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell would like you to forget is that Reagan raised taxes almost as much as he cut them. In fact, he doubled the payroll tax to save Social Security. He also closed loopholes when he cut rates, which would have increased revenue significantly if he wasn't spending so much damn money all the time. But he just tripled the debt, and it didn't seem to bother him all that much.

George H.W Bush sacrificed his presidency by signing a "luxury tax" in 1990 because the Reagan deficits were making the bond markets jumpy. From that, his half-wit of a son learned precisely the wrong lesson. He spent a shitload of money and cut both taxes and regulations, which unsurprisingly doubled the debt. He passed two gigantic tax cuts that weren't paid for, fought two wars that weren't paid for, gave your grandfather hard-on pills that weren't paid for ... and those are just the most memorable things that the junior Bush passed on to America's children and grandchildren.

I've listened to Republicans literally howl about deficits and the debt from the second they were no longer actively expanding both. I've also spent the last two weeks listening to them telling me that extending the Bush tax cuts, whose expiration date was actually written into them and everything, will pay for themselves. In saying this, the GOP isn't merely wrong - they're actively lying.

Feel free not to believe me. After all, I'm just some scumbag blogger, albeit one who happens to know the value of a dollar, unlike most self-described "conservatives." Let's consult some of the leading figures in the Cult of Reagan, those who were "Present at the Creation."

David Stockman, who was Reagan's first Director of the Office of Management and the Budget, took a rather dim view of extending the Bush tax cuts in a New York Times op-ed from last week. Stockman was the first person who put supply-side economics into real-world practice. He knew it was dangerous nonsense then and he seems terrified of it now.

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

(...)

Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.

By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy.

(...)

The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.

That not enough for you? How about we hear from Reagan's Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, so long a conservative and supply-side super hero? He was on Meet the Press this past Sunday, debunking all manner of Republican shitheadery.

MR. GREGORY: All right. Well, Dr. Greenspan, it's not often that you hear Democrats and liberals quoting you. But, in this case, they did when it come to--came to tax cuts because of an interview you gave recently with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg television. Here was the question: "Tax cuts [that] are due to expire at the end of this year. Should they be extended? What should Congress do?" You said, "I should say they should follow the law and then let them lapse." Question: "So to those interests who say but wait a minute, if you let these taxes go my taxes go up, it's going to depress growth?" You said, "Yes, it probably will, but I think we have no choice in doing that, because we have to recognize there are no solutions which are optimum. These are choices between bad and worse." You're saying let them all go, let them all lapse?

MR. GREENSPAN: Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day, that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here on it.

MR. GREGORY: You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?

MR. GREENSPAN: They do not.

There you have it. Tax cuts should not be paid for with borrowed money. Moreover, they do not pay for themselves, which is something that even Bush's economic advisers went to some pains to avoid arguing in 2001-03.

For the record, I think that tax cuts are great. I'm all for them, just like Greenspan. But I'm not quite dumb enough to think that they're anything other than spending, which should be offset by cuts to other programs.

The Republicans and their mouth-breathing Tea Party siblings have proven to be rather ... shy about what cuts need to be made. Don't get me wrong, they're all for screaming about "cutting government." They just won't say where they'll cut, which is sort of key.

Instead of making the factual and effective argument that ObamaCare would be the biggest tax hike in world history, the GOP and the teabaggers moaned about a half a trillion in cuts to Medicare. One can therefore safely assume that Medicare is off the table. Since the Teapublican base is decidedly older, whiter, wealthier than average, and supremely self-entitled, the odds are that Social Security won't be touched. Oh, and since only two of the last six Republican presidents - Eisenhower and the first Bush - and exactly none of the Republican congresses have done anything to constrain the growth of the defense budget, we can write that off as well.

That leaves about seventeen percent of the federal budget to tinker with. That's all. Feel free to check my math if you want, but I'm right.

A few months ago, I wrote that Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was doing heroic - if politically unrealistic - work to cut spending. I also said that he would never be heard of again. Yet again, I'm proven correct.

Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, the minority leader, has praised Mr. Ryan but said the Roadmap would not be a part of the Republican agenda this fall.

“There are parts of it that are well done,” Mr. Boehner told reporters last month. “Other parts I have some doubts about, in terms of how good the policy is.”

By this time next month, you'll be as likely to see Ryan on a milk carton as on the campaign trail. Bet on it.

If you like numbers, here are some more truly scary ones. The United States owes $13 trillion as I write this, carries $5 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt and holds a whopping $57 trillion in unfunded liabilities to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That's $75 trillion dollars - to put that in perspective, just look at all the neat things that the 2008 financial bailout cost more than - and nobody is fucking serious about it. The bailouts cost comparatively little in the larger picture, particularly compared to what's coming. Somehow, the Teapublicans are going to eliminate $75 trillion of bad by manipulating 17% of the budget.

It's been said that no country has ever been a dominant political and military power without also being a dominant economic power as well. Well, you would be hard pressed to find a country in history with such a massive fiscal imbalance and so few people who are actually serious about solving it. If the American people are actually up in arms about letting the incredibly wrong Bush tax cuts expire to even begin bringing some balance to the budget, there's no helping them. The United States will vanish as anything that anyone recognizes as a serious country in thirty years. Or less.

On the other hand, some of you might be Americans who are actually serious about something. In such a case, I would implore you NOT to vote for Republicans this year or in 2012. They and the teabaggers are playing you, pure and simple. If they question you about it, ask them where they were in 2004- 08 regarding fiscal discipline. If nothing else, you know where I was.

You know those notifications about sex offenders moving into a neighborhood that Americans are so fond of? You'd be better off writing in the guy on it on your ballot than 99.9% of Republicans or Tea Party-backed candidates. If nothing else, the pervert is probably better at balancing his chequebook. America will still be fucked, but at least your conscience will be clear.


Oh, and is anybody else as bored of reading me ramble on about this as I am doing it?