Your average poorly informed lefty (but I repeat myself) will reliably tell you that our current fiscal straits are the result of three things: 1. Bush’s wars; 2. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich; 3. Bush’s bank bailouts.
That is not true, of course: The main bank bailouts (odious as they were) have been paid back, often at a profit. The money-losing parts (and the likely money-losing parts) are the ones insisted upon by Barack Obama and his Democratic colleagues: the foreclosure-prevention programs, the endless maintenance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, etc.
The Iraq War, in its most expensive year, cost $140 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Its total cost over the years is estimated at about $700 billion — a good deal less spending than, say, Obama’s stimulus package. It is not, and has not been, an exceptionally large driver of our deficit spending.
Our deficit is running around $1.6 trillion. If we took all military spending — not just the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but the whole shebang — and cut it to $0.00, we’d save about $664 billion a year. Iraq and Afghanistan will cost about $170 billion combined in FY2011. Ending the Bush tax cuts for “the rich” — for the $250,000-and-up crowd, in Obama’s formulation — would put on average about another $80 billion a year into Treasury coffers. (CBO estimates the ten-year cost of those tax cuts at $800 billion.) The spending on the wars and the forgone revenue from the Bush tax cuts do not add up to much of that $1.6 trillion deficit: a little less than 16 percent.
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Another terrific essay by Kevin Williamson.
For a scare, take note of who is lumped in as ”the rich” in his example.
He’s right.
In Thaddeus McCotter Teaches Us How to “Speak Democrat,” Rep McCotter translates ”the rich” (as used by Democrats) as ”YOU.”
Seems Thad is correct….as well as funny as all get-out.
The message we hear from the liberals, and their complicit media, is that the blame, for anything negative, lies with Bush. From the massive overspending, the recession, and still poor economy, our dead from Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble that burst, the failed corporations, the oil spill in the gulf, to even the amount of the overspending done by the liberals, all have been the product of Bush’s actions. ‘Responsibility’ is not within the lexicon of liberal speak.
They, the liberals, do not want you to know the extent of their overspending, or of the danger it poses to our financial footing within the world, partially because I believe they do not know the extent of the danger themselves, and partially because I believe that they don’t wish to know. That highlighted sentence is the simple truth, and the reason that I have been saying here, for weeks, that until the spending issue is resolved, no amount of talk, or even action, upon tax rates will make one little bit of difference, in the direction our government is taking our country. Yet, to even mention spending cuts, one gets castigated by the left, and accused of everything from letting seniors starve, to letting children die from lack of medicine, all while the fat cats in current favor with the government, like the unions, continue to rake in money, due to their pull.
Obama, and the liberals in Congress, have added hundreds of billions to the baseline budget of nearly every sector of government spending in just a few, short years. The EPA, for example, has had it’s own baseline, non-discretionary budget doubled in the space of that time. This isn’t the spending of $100 Million for a bridge somewhere. It is the annual baseline budget, of one of the most intrusive, unConstitutional departments within the Executive branch of our federal government. And other departments have had similar increases.
Bill Clinton’s line in his 1992 Presidential campaign was, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Today’s line to liberals can be summed up by, “It’s the spending, stupid!”
It’s not the taxes, it’s not the disasters, it’s not the economy, and it’s not greedy corporations. It’s the spending of our government, much of it on unConstitutional budget items, that has required the influx of printed money by the Federal Reserve, that has weakened the dollar worldwide, and resulted in ever rising prices for even the smallest of items one purchases, such as a loaf of bread.
SO MANY,
who had voted for the leadership, are coming down to realyse that theirs expectations for a better GOVERNMENT are shattered dramaticly, and notice how the lies keep coming to
hide their REAL AGENDA,GOING ON A DOWNWARD SLOPE, and taking their followers with them,
erracticly, WHERE SOME STILL trying to hang on the false promisses, STILL BASHING THE PRESIDENT BUSH AND HOLDING HIM STILL RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR MISERABLE SITUATION, STILL TODAY, after being bombarded by the BUSH FAULT PROPAGANDA FROM THEIR OWN MEDIA representing the new LEADER
RESPONSABLE FOR MUCH OF HATEFULL FEELING TRANSMISSION TO FORCE THEIR CHOICE OF MASSIF DISTURBENCE TO DIVIDE THE NATION, with effectives subliminal messages
yes they had the tingle on their leg for such destructive success
@Nan G:
That’s why I chuckle to myself the the idiotic keep up their battle cry [ Tax the Rich ] so what they are really yelling is [ TAX ME] [ I want to Pay more Taxes ] [Tax me].
If the same [Tax the Rich ] crowd would just STOP for a minute and think, a light bulb might go off…then the ‘tune’ might change…