How Conservatism and Republicans Killed The Concept of Public Good in The USA

How Conservatism and Republicans Killed The Concept of Public Good in The USA

Meryl Streep’s eery reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” brings to mind Thatcher’s most famous quip, “there is no such thing as ‘society.’” None of the dwindling herd of Republican candidates has quoted her yet but they might as well considering their unremitting bashing of everything public.

What defines a society is a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions — public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities and so on.

Public institutions are supported by all taxpayers, and are available to all. If the tax system is progressive, those who better off (and who, presumably, have benefited from many of these same public institutions) help pay for everyone else.

“Privatiize” means pay-for-it-yourself. The practical consequence of this in an economy whose wealth and income are now more concentrated than any time in 90 years is to make high-quality public goods available to fewer and fewer.

Much of what’s called “public” is increasingly a private good paid for by users — ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuition at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

Much of the rest of what’s considered “public” has become so shoddy that those who can afford to find private alternatives. As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, they buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, they pay premium rates for private care.

Gated communities and office parks now come with their own manicured lawns and walkways, security guards and backup power systems.

Why the decline of public institutions? The financial squeeze on government at all levels since 2008 explains only part of it. The slide really started more than three decades ago with so-called “tax revolts” by a middle class whose earnings had stopped advancing even though the economy continued to grow. Most families still wanted good public services and institutions but could no longer afford the tab.

From that time onward, almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top. But as the upper middle class and the rich began shifting to private institutions, they withdrew political support for public ones. In consequence, their marginal tax rates dropped — setting off a vicious cycle of diminishing revenues and deteriorating quality, spurring more flight from public institutions. Tax revenues from corporations also dropped as big companies went global — keeping their profits overseas and their tax bills to a minimum.

But that’s not the whole story. America no longer values public goods as we did before.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good –improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades — through the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War — this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism and then communism. The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. (It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, and the largest public works project in history called the National Defense Interstate Highway Act.)

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships;” or, for Republicans, simply “vouchers.”

Mitt Romney’s speaks derisively of what he terms the Democrats’ “entitlement” society in contrast to his “opportunity” society. At least he still envisions a society.  But he hasn’t explained how ordinary Americans will be able to take advantage of good opportunities without good public schools, affordable higher education, good roads and adequate health care.
His “entitlements” are mostly a mirage anyway. Medicare is the only entitlement growing faster than the GDP but that’s because the costs of health care are growing faster than the economy, and any attempt to turn Medicare into a voucher — without either raising the voucher in tandem with those costs or somehow taming  them — will just reduce the elderly’s access to health care. Social Security, for its part, hasn’t contributed to the budget deficit; it’s had surpluses for years.

Other safety nets are in tatters. Unemployment insurance reaches just 40 percent of the jobless these days (largely because eligibility requires having had a steady full-time job for a number of years rather than, as with most people, a string of jobs or part-time work).

What could Mitt be talking about? Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent by 2011.

Only in one respect is Romney right. America has created a whopping entitlement for the biggest Wall Street banks and their top executives — who, unlike most of the rest of us, are no longer allowed to fail. They can also borrow from the Fed at almost no cost, then lend the money out at 3 to 6 percent.

All told, Wall Street’s entitlement is the biggest offered by the federal government, even though it doesn’t show up in the budget. And it’s not even a public good. It’s just private gain.

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

Conservative is a cancer. It has been growing and eating away at the promise of the American dream for decades. If allowed to spread it will end economic mobility and freedom as we know it.

Rick Santorum's 'Freedom' and values are Pretty Much Slavery

Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is

Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is

Appearing on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dodged a question about whether or not the U.S. should have invaded Iraq in 2003. Instead of answering the question about knowing what we know now, Romney, who’s flip-flopped between calling the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq “appropriate” and an “astonishing failure,” stood by his support for the war when he knew only what he knew then:

    WALLACE: [L]ooking back, and hindsight is always 20/20, should we have invaded? [...]

    ROMNEY: At that time, we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now. At that time, Saddam Hussein was hiding. He was not letting the inspectors from the United Nations into the various places that they wanted to go. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was blocked from going into the palaces and so forth. And the intelligence in our nation and other nations was that this tyrant had weapons of mass destruction.

    And in the light of that — that belief, we took action which was appropriate at the time.


While running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 at the height of the run-up to the Iraq war, Romney campaigned alongside President George W. Bush. Then-Romney aide and now-adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters: “Al Gore has been a critic to the president’s policies in regard to the war on terrorism, specifically on the plans with regard to Iraq. Mitt’s position is that he supports the president.”

In his 2007 presidential campaign, Romney answered the same question Wallace posed the same way. “I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time,” he said, noting that Hussein had not allowed inspectors in. But, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, by the fall of 2002, U.N. inspectors had entered Iraq and were making progress taking stock of weapons of mass destruction programs.

Today, Romney repeated the false claim that Hussein never allowed inspectors in, adding that “the IAEA was blocked from going into the palaces.” However, in a March 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog wrote: “In the past three months they have conducted over 200 inspections at more than 140 locations, entering without prior notice into Iraqi… presidential palaces.”

Ignoring altogether what the Iraqi government wanted, Romney said the U.S. “should have left 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 personnel there.”

Many Romney advisers pushed for invading Iraq in the early 2000s, and now they’re doing the same with Iran.

Asked by Wallace if, as president, Romney would send troops back to Iraq, the candidate replied, “I think the decision to send U.S. troops into a combat setting is a — is a very high threshold decision. This is not something you do easily.” Perhaps he should apply that principle to his reflections about the initial invasion.

How hard can it be to remember and have a straight up opinion on something his buddy George W. Bush one of the three worse presidents in U.S. history did? Bush kicked out inspectors. Why? Because they were not finding the WMD Bush and the conservative media said were in Iraq. Should U.S. military families put their lives in the hands of someone who wants it both ways - to pretend he doesn't remember important historical facts and also says he is an expert on foriegn policy. Maybe he can see Russia from the balcony at his mansion. 

The Desperate Mitt Romney Tells Lies About President Obama Instead of Attacking His Sleazy Opponent Newt Gingrich. No Wonder Mitt is Falling in The Polls

The Desperate Mitt Romney Tells Lies About President Obama Instead of Attacking His Sleazy Opponent Newt Gingrich. No Wonder Mitt is Falling in The Polls

Here's something Mitt Romney is being firm and consistent on: lying about the Obama administration's record on regulations. Monday in New Hampshire, Romney said:

    The level of regulation in America, every the regulators, the government, come up with new regulations. And they send them out. The rate of regulatory burden has increased four-fold since Obama has become president. Four times the amount of regulation coming out per year as in the past. And so businesses say, ‘gosh, I’m not sure I want to invest in America.’

Of course, both the claim about the increase in regulation under Obama and the claim about the resulting effect on business are false, but it's not the first time Romney has gone there. Think Progress takes us through the sorry history:

    When Romney made the same claim during an interview with NPR in September, NPR asked the Romney campaign for verification, at which point the campaign was forced to admit that “the Governor misspoke.”

    Instead, the Romney camp told NPR that new regulations under Obama are twice what they were under President George W. Bush. Trouble is, that’s not true either, as Bloomberg News pointed out:

        Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

    Later on during the event, Romney claimed that, according to an official government report, regulations costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion annually.

You guessed it: That's not true either. Just a fraction of a percent of layoffs have been attributed to regulation under Obama, and more than one study, including an OMB estimate, have found that the economic benefits of major regulations outweigh their costs, sometimes by a large margin. Never mind that regulations keep us safe on the job and give us clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. But while the specific numbers Romney spews on this will probably change, I think we can count on him to be unwavering and neither flip nor flop in his basic commitment to falsehood.

I'm not sure how simply repeating the word regulation over and over again became an attack tool by elitist conservatives. You have rules for your kids so they do not misbehave. Regulations are just rules for business so they don't misbehave or they at least do so less often. Mining regulations save miners' lives - when mining companies adhere to them. You think driving on our highways is dangerous now, try scraping the regulations and see how safe it is simply to get from point A to Point B. Conservatives continue to deal with problems with childish and simplistic answers to complex problems. Not one of them should be reelected until the conservatives movement grows up and becomes responsible adults.

Time to Investigate Justice Clarence Thomas, Perhaps the Most Corrupt SCOTUS Judge In Modern History

Time to Investigate Justice Clarence Thomas, Perhaps the Most Corrupt SCOTUS Judge In Modern History

Twenty House Democrats called Thursday on the U.S. Judicial Conference to formally request that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Justice Thomas indicated on his annual financial disclosure forms that his wife had received no income since he joined the bench in 1991, despite the fact that his wife had in fact earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007.

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 requires Supreme Court justices to disclose their spouse's income.

"To believe that Justice Thomas didn't know how to fill out a basic disclosure form is absurd," Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) said. "It is reasonable, in every sense of the word, to believe that a member of the highest court in the land should know how to properly disclose almost $700,000 worth of income."

"To not be able to do so is suspicious, and according to law, requires further investigation. To accept Justice Thomas's explanation without doing the required due diligence would be irresponsible."

The letter (PDF) comes a day after President Barack Obama asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, his landmark health reforms.

Seventy-four Members of Congress in February signed a letter calling for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because of his family's financial ties to groups dedicated to lobbying against it.

In response, Justice Thomas released his new financial disclosure form in May. It indicated his wife received a $150,000 salary from the group Liberty Central in 2010. The group, which she co-founded, fights to repeal health care reform, among other things.

The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law.

Let's count down how many seconds it takes for conservatives to start yelling witch-hunt...3....2....1. The problem with investigating conservative corruption is you have to break out a dictionary and explain what ethics are. This takes a few days to sink in. Than they're still not sure exactly what you're talking about.

Ethics Challenged Republican of the Week - Mitt Romney Owns Boeing Stock, Takes Their Side in Labor Despite

Ethics Challenged Republican of the Week - Mitt Romney Owns Boeing Stock, Takes Their Side in Labor Despite

As Mitt Romney steps up his attacks on the National Labor Relations Board for its decision to block Boeing from retaliating against striking workers by building a new plant in South Carolina, a new report from Bloomberg notes that the former Massachusetts governor owns a significant amount of stock in the Seattle-based aerospace corporation.

According to his recently-released personal financial disclosure form, Romney owns up to $100,000 in Boeing stock. Though Romney’s personal assets, which total between $190 million and $250 million, are managed by a blind trust which he does not control, its contents are listed on the Massachusetts Republican’s disclosure forms and are easy for anyone to find with a simple Google search.

Given the potential for a conflict of interest, ThinkProgress spoke with Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom about the Boeing matter. Ferhnstrom denied any possibility of impropriety, telling ThinkProgress that “[Romney's] personal investments are all in a blind trust. Those are investment decisions that are made by a trustee.” Fehrnstrom sidestepped the fact Romney doesn’t have to manage his own investments to know what’s in them, maintaining simply that there was “no” conflict of interest.

Conservatives continue to have a twisted and strange view of freedom in the USA. They think big business should have all the power to do anything they want and the workers who make corporate profits possible should have no rights at all. That is the secret code, the implied meaning when conservatives say they are "pro business". What they really mean is that we should live in an America where labor has no rights.

Republicans Holding The Country Hostage to Shove Catastrophic Policies Down Our Throats Has Become Standard Operating Procedure

Republicans Holding The Country Hostage to Shove Catastrophic Policies Down Our Throats Has Become Standard Operating Procedure

The standoff du jour in Washington is about a vote to raise the federal debt ceiling. Democrats and the White House insist it must be done—as does Wall Street—while fiscal conservatives and Tea Party activists are demanding serious concessions, and in some cases, an unconditional “no” vote. As the conversation reaches a crescendo, it’s useful to take a quick look at what the debt ceiling actually is, and what forces are at play in the debate.

When the United States needs to borrow money, the Treasury Department issues bonds in order to pay for the deficit spending. Before 1917, Congress had to approve this borrowing every time it happened, but World War I created a need for more flexibility and lawmakers gave [1] the federal government unchecked borrowing powers, provided the total amount was less than a certain limit.

Congress now needs to approve any borrowing past the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, which the United States will reach “no later” than May 16, according [2] to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, the government would have to stop spending—including stopping interest payments on those Treasury bonds, meaning that the United States would effectively default on its debt.

Opportunistic Republicans have correctly understood this vote as a chance to force Democrats into approving several goals held by fiscal conservatives and the Tea Party. Though the debt ceiling will be reached because of past spending—including many Republican initiatives like the Medicare drug benefit and the costly invasion of Iraq—Republicans insist that concessions on future spending are needed before they will agree to raise the limit.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said [3] last month that all forty-seven Republican Senators were unified in their opposition to raising the debt ceiling unless “credible” efforts were made to cut federal spending. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has also said [4] his caucus would not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless “it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut...the job-killing spending binge in Washington.”

Tea Party activists, meanwhile, are working furiously to ensure Republicans in Congress stand firm. The Tea Party Patriots, the largest organized Tea Party group in the country, warned [5] that “Republican credibility as fiscally responsible managers of public resources is on the line” with the debt ceiling vote.

The group is holding [5] a televised town hall this week on the issue, and urging [6] activists to crash Congressional offices on Thursday to demand their representatives hold the line. The far-right website World Net Daily is has already sent 250,000 letters [7] to 242 House Republicans, urging them to vote against a debt limit increase.

The conservative position makes sense on both messaging and strategic levels. It's simple to push the idea that the United States has somehow reached the limit of what it can spend—though of course this “limit” is arbitrary, and has been raised [8] ten times just since 2001, again often by Republicans who needed to finance expensive tax cuts or wars.

From a strategic perspective, the threat of default is a gun to the head of Democrats who would otherwise be unwilling to even negotiate on many of the demands currently being made by Republicans. As Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) told [9] World Net Daily, “I must be convinced we have wrung every nickel of spending out of this.... This is the one tool available to us, and unilateral disarmament leads to financial Armageddon.”

However, Republicans—to their detriment—haven’t really made it clear what they want in return for approving a debt ceiling increase, beyond the aforementioned "credible cuts." When they have, these demands are often wildly unrealistic.

Republican leaders in Congress are proposing “a wide range [10] of major structural reforms” to the budget process, including statutory spending caps, a constitutional amendment mandating balanced federal budgets and a two-thirds threshold for approving tax increases or debt limit increases in the future.

The balanced budget proposal is simple posturing, since it would require sixty-seven Congressional votes along with the approval of thirty-eight state legislatures. It would also impose almost impossibly stringent requirements on a government that often needs to deficit spend, especially in times of multiple wars and economic distress.

The two-thirds approval requirement on new taxes, meanwhile, would essentially spell the end of tax increases in America. California has such an amendment on the books, and the impossibility of getting legislative approval of new taxes left the state with “no choice but to cut its budget to ribbons during the economic downturn,” as the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo noted [11]. It’s easy to imagine conservatives might actually enjoy this outcome, but not easy to imagine that the current Congress would impose such a strict measure.

Tea Partyers in the House and presidential candidates eager to ride the activist wave building around the debt limit vote are issuing even more preposterous demands. Former senator and current presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said yesterday [12] he would “absolutely” let the United States default on its debt unless healthcare reform was entirely defunded first. Fellow White House hopeful Newt Gingrich doesn’t want [13] the debt ceiling to be raised unless Congress immediately enacts the Ryan plan to block-grant Medicaid spending. Freshman Tea Party Representative Allen West (R-FL) says [14] he would like to cut corporate tax rates in half before approving a debt ceiling increase.

Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)—a professional one-upper of Tea Party rage—has given up issuing any demands at all, and is advocating a straight “no” vote [15]. In her view, the United States wouldn’t have to default on its debt—it would make the Treasury bond payments with money that would otherwise have been used to send out those pesky Social Security checks, or whatever other spending that would no longer be “prioritized,” in her words.

So much like the recent budget showdown, the Republican base is animated and the demands of the party’s elected leaders are increasingly extreme and do not really coalesce around a specific list of reasonable proposals. The White House has been asking for a simple, “clean” reauthorization of the debt limit with no string attached, though it recently opened the door [16] to adding “defict-reduction elements.”

An additional factor working against Republicans is that the threat of default may be so dangerous that Americans realize the party is playing with gasoline next to a flammable economic recovery. If the debt limit is not raised, Treasury bonds would suddenly become a shaky investment and, as Annie Lowery outlines [17] in Slate, financial markets could start dumping bonds en masse, possibly even before an actual default occurs. They might never be viewed as a safe investment again, meaning also that the US dollar would lose its position as the default currency. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told [18] Ezra Klein that “the system will collapse into turmoil.”

Other analyses [19] say the end-game might not be that bad, and that the Treasury Department could take several to avoid default and calm investors. Perhaps that’s true, but nobody involved really wants to find out. Boehner was told [20] in no uncertain terms by Wall Street that debt ceiling politics risk “catastrophic outcomes.”

Republican leaders are caught in a place they’d probably rather not be—between diametrically opposite demands of Wall Street and the Tea Party. Leadership will ultimately cut a deal to get loose from this situation, and safe money is on Tea Partiers being disappointed--the Constitution won’t be rewritten to include balanced budgets. The only real question now is what the consolation prize will be.

One of those situations where it is tempting to give the extremists the medicine they asked for, than sit back and watch them choke on it. Defaulting on our financial obligations would likely cause another financial collapse and end the use of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Many of the tea nuts are middle-class workers. They think they'll be punishing Washington, but it is their jobs and homes that will be lost. The multi-millionaires and their lobbyists who write most legislation always survive, they live in a comfortable little bubble. From the 1980s until now it has been the conservative movement - with help from both Republicans and conservative Democrats who went on a deregulation binge. That lead to the financial collapse of the savings and loans of the 1980s and our current recession - which is responsible for loosing $4 trillion of the nation's wealth. These are the very same conservatives who now think it is in our best interests to have another round of misery. If a fortune teller kept giving people false readings they'd demand a refund and never frequent that fortune teller again. In the case of the conservative philosophy people just keep going back, rewarding the same failed fortune telling over and over.

Deficit problem is a Lack of Revenue Problem, Not a Spending Problem

Deficit problem is a Lack of Revenue Problem, Not a Spending Problem

In the past week, Fox News figures have adopted the GOP talking point that the nation's deficit is a "spending problem, not a revenue problem." But numerous economic experts have said that decreased revenue is a major cause of the deficit.

..But Numerous Economic Experts Say That We Have A Revenue Problem

Krugman: "Government Spending Has Continued To Rise More Or Less On Its Pre-Crisis Trend" While "Revenue Has Plunged." In an October 17, 2010, blog post, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:

For all those commenters saying that we must have had a surge in government spending -- I mean, look at the deficit! -- a simple picture:

krugmandeficitchart1

Government spending has continued to rise more or less on its pre-crisis trend. Revenue has plunged, because the economy is deeply depressed. [NewYorkTimes.com, 10/17/10]

Krugman: Since 2007, "Revenue Plunged, Leading To Big Deficits." In an October 18, 2010, post, Krugman wrote:

During the pre-crisis period, spending grew slightly faster than GDP -- that's Medicare plus the Bush wars -- while revenue grew more slowly, presumably reflecting tax cuts.

What happened after the crisis? Spending continued to grow at roughly the same rate -- a bulge in safety net programs, offset by budget-slashing at the state and local level. GDP stalled -- which is why the ratio of spending to GDP rose. And revenue plunged, leading to big deficits.

But I'm sure that the usual suspects will find ways to keep believing that it's all about runaway spending. [NewYorkTimes.com, 10/18/10]

Krugman also included this chart: see above

...Former Reagan OMB Official: "I Think The Biggest Problem Is Revenues." In an interview with Talking Points Memo, David Stockman, a former Office of Management and Budget director under President Reagan, responded to Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) budget plan and stated: "I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn't part of the solution." From Talking Points Memo:

While the government teetered on the brink of a shutdown last week over short term funding, economists across the ideological spectrum weighed in on the GOP's long-term plan with negative reviews. The biggest shock came from high-profile economists with GOP leanings, who also criticized it on the merits.

"It doesn't address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit," David Stockman told me in a Thursday phone interview. "I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn't part of the solution. It's a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone with this religious catechism about taxes."

...David Cay Johnston: "There Is A Simple, Factual Way To Describe What Is Happening To Our Government: We Have A Revenue Problem." In a March 4 column, Pulitzer Prize winner and economics author David Cay Johnston wrote: "There is a simple, factual way to describe what is happening to our government: We have a revenue problem." From Johnston's column:

Right after the midterm elections, when false claims that lower tax rates increased revenues helped win votes, Fox News captured the lockstep approach perfectly in a piece on its website about how Republican leaders were "on message."

...Harvard Business Review Group Director: "[T]he Giant Deficit Is Mainly The Result Of The Collapse In Tax Receipts Brought On By The Recession." In an October 2010 post on his Reuters blog, Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group, analyzed the deficit and concluded that it was "mainly the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession":

The Treasury Department reported on Oct. 15 that the deficit in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, was $1.294 trillion. That's less than FY 2009's $1.416 trillion, but it's still really really big. Why is it so big, though? Is it because of all that stimulus and bailout spending? Or is something else going on?

Anyone who has ever had a hardheaded friend or relative who refuses to accept responsibility or admit their mistakes knows what is going on with Republicans and our economy. They recklessly cut taxes, failed to pay for two wars and trashed the housing market and the economy. Now they say all our problems are runaway government spending. Conservative Republicans are the party of irresponsible welfare queens who now refuse to pay the bill which has come due.

Conservative media stands by one of its most infamous liars, Fox News And Hannity “Forget” Breitbart’s History Of Deceit And Dishonesty While Helping To Flog His Book


We do have death panels in America. Its run by Congressional Republicans, with Paul Ryan (R-WI) steering the ship - Republicans Violate Their "Seniors' Bill of Rights"

That didn't take long. As the battle over health care reform reached a fever pitch in the fall of 2009, the Republican National Committee rolled out a "Seniors' Bill of Rights." But with the midterms safely won, the GOP has predictably turned its back on its pledge of "no cuts to Medicare to pay for another program." After all, the House GOP budget passed last week not only and massively shifts costs onto the elderly. As it turns out, the Ryan plan calls for the very same cuts to the Medicare Advantage program Republicans decried during the 2010 elections.