1 Boring Old Man

from: the left coaster

by Mary

Bush used the recession of 2001 to push through two tax cuts to stimulate the economy:

Mr. Bush’s 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut of 2001, considered the largest in history, contained $174 billion of cuts during its first two full years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. The second-largest tax cut — the 10-year, $350 billion package engineered by Mr. Bush in 2003 — contained $231 billion in 2004 and 2005.

So in 4 years, when the economy was doing poorly, but was not truly desperate, Bush and the Republicans forced through more than $400 billion in tax cuts to address the recession. And those tax cuts cost the economy trillions over the life of those cuts. The same Republicans (and their friends, the Blue Dogs) think that $800 billion to keep the economy from going into a real depression is too expensive and will cost future generations too much. Well, they’ve already saddled the future generations trillions in debt that will never be recovered. And what do they have to show for their program? A world that is dropping into an extremely deep hole because they’ve already spent our country’s wealth on their get-rich-quick gambles.

So hundreds of thousands of Americans, and maybe millions more will be paying for the selfish and mean-spirited cuts in the current stimulus package because making sure people have food stamps or health care during this economic downturn is something we can’t afford to spend. After all, we’ve already spent it on tax cuts for the rich. The people who vote for cuts on the poor after they voted to enrich the already obscenely rich should be tossed into the seventh pit of hell. Would that they could experience the hell they’ve created for others.

[… and a couple of those who deserve a special place in that seventh pit of hell wrote the article discussed in my last post.] Mary, of course, is in the center of what’s going on right now. Bush and friends slashed taxes immediately on arrival. It took Clinton four years to get us pointed in the right direction and W. ended all of that in his first year – well before he began to throw money [and lives] at his pet war in Iraq.

The smoke screen here is that Obama added tax cuts to the Stimulus Bill before it was even presented to Congress to appease the Republicans [a mistake on his part], and now they’re screaming for more. And now the Neocons are suggesting we throw in an increase in military spending just for good measure. We’re still at war on three fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Washington. And I’m thinking that the War in Washington is the most important one right now.

The War in Washington We are witnessing a campaign that should be familiar to us by now. Our new president is under attack from all quarters. Republican Congressmen in both Houses spend their days hammering the Stimulus Bill, contempt dripping from every pore. Fox News and Talk Radio run hourly search and destroy missions on the airways, aiming at every vulnerability of our new administration they can find or create. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, defying a time-honored code of silence by former occupants of the White House, is giving dismissive and devaluing interviews extolling the virtues of torture. Rush Limbaugh is selling Waterboarding tee-shirts. And the directors of the now-defunct Project for the New American Century, resident fellows at the neoconservative cathedral of the American Enterprise Institute, have written an op-ed piece promoting their reason d’etre, increasing defense spending, as part of the stimulus package. One thing you can say about the Republicans, they don’t give up easily. They pulled out the election in 2000 in the courts [a strategy still in operation in Minnestota]. They stayed with the Iraq War long after its reason for even being was thoroughly debunked. And they continued it with a "Surge" when the more rational heads in their own Party were saying "get out!" Now, soundly defeated at the voting booth in November, they’re mounting another "Surge" on all fronts – Congress and Media. Like their counterparts in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s not even clear what they are fighting for. Their precious business contributors are going down with the economy they raided for eight years. The financial sector that became a lucritive gambling casino is drying up. The religious right is fragmenting into small churches that defocus on politics. And the growing army of jobless people are not ripe for a right wing coup. The White Collar version of the Aryan Nation of MacMansions is slipping from their grasp, but still they fight on – driven by an ideology as warped as Al Qaeda’s…