Conservatives love to talk about personal responsibility.
It’s their code for calling poor people irresponsible and insisting that irresponsibility is the reason they are poor.
Oh, it has nothing to do with Republican policies that make it near-impossible for them to raise themselves out of their poverty while simultaneously dumping copious amounts of money into the coffers of corporations and into the pockets of billionaires. However, when it comes time for these so-called deficit hawks to take responsibility for their actions, they lie so blithely it’s shocking.
After President Obama’s television speech Monday night, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, accused Obama of being on the “largest spending binge in American history” and said the chief executive wants a “blank check” to continue spending.
That was a lie of magnificent proportions.
Boehner, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., seems to be suffering from either a lapse of memory or veracity.
Is it a bad memory? No. A lapse of veracity it is.
That quarter voted for some of the biggest drivers of the nation’s accumulated debt and the current annual budget deficit.
They voted for both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the unfunded Medicare Part D Plan for a whopping total of $3.4 trillion of the debt and part of the $1.5 trillion budget for the fiscal year.
The wars have cost the U.S. $1.3 trillion since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Bush tax cuts have cost the country $1.7 trillion and Medicare Part D has cost $369 billion the last decade.
These were Republican-inspired expenditures. To hang these examples of wayward policy on Obama, who was in the Illinois state Senate when it started, is ludicrous.
Regardless of what happens with the debt ceiling—and the nation’s credit rating may be lowered even if the ceiling is lifted, because of the shenanigans we’ve seen the last few weeks—the GOP must come to grips with a single fact: Supply-side economics have failed.
The concept came with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and since then corporations have thrived while moving American jobs and money offshore, wages have stagnated, worker benefits have shriveled to almost nothing, and what money millions of people did have in their 401K accounts disappeared because of a poorly policed Wall Street.
It’s okay for those on the political right to believe whatever they want, because you can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune.)
About Post Author
