Just in case you needed more proof that no one actually cares about the debt.
For the last seven years debt has been a made-issue invented by Republicans, and Very Serious People were only too happy to play along. If Republicans control the White House expect massive tax cuts and a larger deficit.
Comrade Jake
What’s hilarious is that the candidate proposing the most sane fiscal policy on the GOP side is…. well, you know.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Comrade Jake:
Best evidence of “secret Dhimmicrat” status.
MomSense
@Snarki, child of Loki:
It’s sort of like the spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. The only way the Republican base will take their raising taxes medicine is if they are also given heaping spoonfuls of hate.
redshirt
I wonder what, if anything, your average wingnut sincerely cares about.
I don’t think much of anything, except hating liberals.
Citizen Alan
@redshirt:
At this point, the feeling’s mutual.
Mike in NC
GOP agenda is tax cuts for the rich, with a little red meat to the yahoos about outlawing all abortions and deporting all foreigners.
Belafon
We can’t expel 11 million people if we have to worry about deficits.
//
Luthe
But but but- The Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility! /swoons into ver fainting couch
Chris
Well, we all knew this was going to happen. I don’t want to say “I told you so,” because I don’t even remember if I, specifically, did, but I’ve seen plenty of commenters saying stuff to the effect that sometime in late January, 2016, the Republican pendulum would swing right back to Deficits Don’t Matter. (Unless Obama’s successor was also a Democrat, of course).
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Guns and abortion.
I keep seeing some liberals insist on this. It never made any sense. Conservatives don’t give a shit about liberals, except to the extent that liberals stand between them and baby Jebus.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
Quite.
It bothers me sometimes to what extent that’s become true for me, but I really don’t know how the fuck else I’m supposed to react when that entire demographic has made it its mission in life to screw me over by any means necessary.
Mark B.
Abortions, Muslims, Xenophobia. With a healthy dose of racism mixed in. The Republicans don’t need any policy positions, those can lead to embarrassing questions about how to implement them.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Comrade Jake: Yes that’s what’s so scary to the villagers and “serious” republicans about Trump – he’s not reading from the approved script. Quite frankly I can’t believe JEB? thinks tax cuts will sell the same way they did for his bro, but he’s stupid enough to try it apparently, because they got nothing else.
Omnes Omnibus
Back to classic EC. Nice.
scav
@Brachiator: Nah, it’s not even the baybeeee — it’s what the guns and the abortion and the Bayeeeeee-waving allows them, personal control over others. Religion gives them the flexible framework with which to judge others behind a sacrosanct shield of invulnerability. Hence the OT fixation.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@scav: It also serves as an unlimited personal behavior mulligan because Jeebus will always forgive them even though he’s vengeful and unforgiving toward those they hate.
JPL
Tax cuts pay for themselves.
JPL
Jeb is ridding us of those pesky environmental regulations also. What’s next, is he going to appoint Sarah to the Department of Education.
scav
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: They speak for him, they speak for the law.
They’re also not averse to a solid serving of fawning adoration as to their innate superiority. The xeno- islamo- homo- misogynia all-you-can-eat smorgasbord is open 24-hours with their personally recorded voice of god mix tapes playing in the background.
Mark B.
@JPL: Volkswagen is suddenly interested in Jeb’s candidacy.
Doug!
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks
Paul in KY
@Comrade Jake: It will be Yuuggee & Classy!!!!
Sorry. Can’t help myself.
Brachiator
@scav:
Guns are not about control. They are about the paranoia of fear and the myth of personal liberty through violence.
Abortion may be about control, but like anti-gay nonsense, it is about arbitrary cherry picking of supposed Biblical teachings to “protect” society.
“Hence the OT fixation.” OT as in Old Testament? Nah, it’s all NT and the idea that freedom from the old law allows a new improvisation based bigotry. So you have Kim “It’s what’s in my heart don’t bother me with actual consistent theology anti-gay but I can get divorced as often as I want Christianity”Davis.
jl
The issue of reducing debt and deficits has never been high on the real GOP agenda, but that issue has been high on their PR and dog whistle wedge issue agenda. The GOP con has been that they do not care a moldy fig about public debt or deficits, but they do care immensely about who benefits from deficits and debt, and they care immensely about their PR con game to get policies implemented that would be very unpopular if honestly described, to the benefit of their wealthy supporters. The real GOP agenda has not changed, but its standard PR con game is falling apart. To some extent thanks to Trump, the insane person with the least insane domestic economic policy.
However, it is difficult to know exactly what is in Trump’s mind, if anything. I read an analysis of Trump’s tax proposals, and they are about as bad as any of the other loads of BS from the other GOPers: extremely regressive and will result in large net reduction in government revenue. Looks like Trump and Jeb? are playing the same tax con game, make a fuss over some infamous loopholes, like hedge fund managers average tax rate and partially fix that, and then go to town on usual GOP flat tax supply side nonsense. If Trump follows through on his proposals for large infrastructure projects (will he?) then deficits will explode.
Serious people who understand the economy (not GOP, and not Washington Post editorial board or innumerate economic columnists) do worry about debt and deficits. Not a problem now or in foreseeable future with sane policy, but sane policy is irrelevant when considering any GOP economic proposal.
ruemara
@Brachiator: how many wingnuts do you hang with? Because the ones I encounter do things explicitly to pass off liberals.
Cacti
@JPL:
Jeb will also rid working folks of the burdens of a 40-hour workweek and a statutory minimum wage.
Next, he’ll probably lament that not enough of today’s 10 year olds have known the satisfaction that can only come from a day’s work in a coal mine.
srv
Well, it’s hard to care about the debt when ISIS is running loose. Hillary starts throwing Obama under the bus:
Cacti
@srv:
Are they still going to send Ebola-infected terrorists across the Mexican border?
Seanly
Fixed it for you.
And they’d be looking to do Constitutional Amendments to take away rights. No gay marriage and an amendment stating there is no right to privacy (to reverse Griswald & Roe).
scav
@Brachiator: They certainly pick and choose a bit, NT personal relationship with God for Me, but not for Thee, and the punishments for others are OT but the personal forgiveness is exclusively Me. I guess I was thinking more about the punishment for others side of things. The abortion isn’t about the babies, its about the control over women so yes, cherry picking. And I would disagree about the guns, they are a safety blanket about being in control, The paranoia and the fear are deliberately added accelerants for their purchases, but having the weapon gives you the delusion of being in control (control over your movements could count theoretically as liberty). There’s also a bit of living your life according to a script, the good old-time western, yeee-haw white hats glory which is another trick of theirs. They do like their behavioral ruts.
Belafon
@Brachiator:
Guns are also about bullying and intimidation, which is why those groups walk around WalMart with them. It’s a form of control they use because the skin color/gender/sexual orientation assertions are no longer working.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Guns aren’t just about fear, though; they’re about controlling others through their fear of violence. Having a gun is great because you can intimidate other people and feel like a big man when they back down. It means not having to treat Those People as if they’re equals- you can kill them and claim you were standing your ground if they refuse to acknowledge your armed superiority- and the ability to scare your woman into not leaving for fear you’ll hunt her down and kill her.
Some guy
@srv:
Pure fairy tale. The jihadis ts took up arms on day one. This is the fairy tale the Gulf propagandists tried to sell,and most of the western press bought the tale, hook,line,and sinker.
Patrick
@srv:
There was no ISIS before George W Bush attacked Iraq in 2003. People who were against the idiotic Iraq war shouldn’t have to once again pay for a war that the idiots supported. People like you should have to pay for fighting ISIS yourselves.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator: Conservatives view liberals as fun to poke with b#tsh!ttery and watch freak out. It’s not clear whether the poking is for actual wingnut causes or simply to watch libtards squirm isn’t always clear.
Deficits and federal debt are nothing more than cudgels with which to beat liberals and Dems for spending money on Those People. “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter” after all. We’ve already seen this with the
Shrub Pruning SpreeBush Tax Cuts after eight years of smelling salts over Clinton’s budgets.catclub
@Patrick:
I would be willing to pay for the parachute and spork we send with Bill Kristol to go and fight them over there.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
The wingnuts I encounter want what they want, and are upset that they are not getting their way. They don’t respect liberals enough to give a rat’s ass about what might piss them off.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
And it goes beyond that when you consider that “liberal” includes black people, immigrants, union members, people on welfare, members of religious minority groups, peaceful protesters arguing for a liberal cause… and many other cases where it’s not “poke with batshittery and watch freak out” so much as “kick in the gutter until they bleed, then laugh about it.” Often literally, as we see with police abuse, reactions to the OWS rallies, Stand Your Ground laws, or the like.
Hurting the people that aren’t of their tribe is the guiding principle, but I do mean “hurting,” and badly, crossing the line into “killing” on a not irregular basis. “Pissing liberals off” like, say, the trolls who stop by hear and word-vomit their UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH! is just a very, very lite version of something much nastier.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: Zackly. The primary meaning of “The Deficit” is “welfare.” “I’m concerned about The Deficit” means “We’re giving away too much to blacks, browns, sluts, and lazy government workers leaning on their shovels.” The second meaning of “The Deficit” is “the bad economy.” “I’m concerned about The Deficit” means “the government spent too much money on those people and now can’t pay its bills and something something and that’s the reason why my job sucks.” I bet if you polled 100 Republicans on what the deficit was, like a dozen would say anything remotely akin to the actual technical definition.
LWA
It was somewhere in the 90s when I realized that there really didn’t exist any such animal as a “fiscal conservative”, that was one of the turning points for me, in moving from conservative to liberal.
It was when I really looked at the budget, and realized that Reagan had exploded the deficit, that the military wastes more in a day that the entire Great Society ever did, and when people complain about gummint spending, out of all the thousands of budget line items, they really, really, only care about 2 which are food stamps and welfare.
And not even the food stamps that go to deserving people like soldiers’ families, or welfare like Grandma’s Medicare.
No, out of all the billions that the gummint spends, on the thousands of categories, “fiscal conservatism” always and only ever means “money that goes to Those People.
srv
@Patrick:
Agreed, Trump was against the war. At least he accepts the responsibility leaders must take for their predecessors mistakes.
Agreed again. Why is it you support Hillary the war supporter again?
Hillary supporters, excluded I’m sure, because as always, it’s different if you’re a democrat.
If hypocrisy was a painting, you just went full-metal Pollock.
Patrick
@srv:
Please tell me; what do you want me to do if Hillary runs against Jeb Bush? At least Hillary apologized for her vote. Jeb Bush just last week spoke highly of his brother and his idiotic war. I vote for the least evil.
And thus, I vote for Sanders in the primary.
catclub
@LWA:
also the massive foreign aid – 20% of the budget,
aid to Israel does not count.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I couldn’t bring myself to watch Colbert with Ted Cruz last night, but I gather Cruz was at once banging the drum of Reagan’s tax cuts creating an economic miracle, and the debt-and-deficits are bankrupting our children and grandchildren!
srv
@Patrick: Those who support Trump don’t have to worry about such moral conundrums.
Kay
@LWA:
I remember the day for my husband. Bush’s farm bill, 2002.
Brachiator
@scav:
@Roger Moore:
@Belafon:
Here you get to the heart of my point. Gun mania is not just about controlling others. It’s about feeling helpless, spent, impotent. It is a response to the degree to which conservatives feel that they have lost control, that the world that they live in is one that they don’t recognize anymore because they are being asked to share it with people who don’t necessarily look like them. And the worst simply want to strike back.
That’s why Obama struck a nerve way back when he talked about these folks clinging to guns and religion.
@boatboy_srq:
This may be the case in the land of punditry and blogging, where nothing real is on the line. But this is not the situation in the real world, where people’s lives are diminished by conservative law and policy.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: The Anti-Choice thing is about trying to control women’s sexuality.
mr_gravity
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I suffered so others didn’t have to.
Colbert took it to Cruz when he started the Reagan BS and never let up concluding that Reagan would be appalled by today’s GOP.
Cruz had nothing but a smirk when it was over. And the smirk looked uncomfortable.
bemused
@Brachiator:
I know plenty of rightwingers who want both, win/have their way and piss off liberals.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY:
Nah. It’s crab-bucket-ism. If you got pregnant when you weren’t ready, you were obviously being irresponsible, hence you need to be humiliated and punished for it. Of course this rule has exceptions for people that the judgmental person knows personally, who were just in over their heads but otherwise good people, and they should always be able to deal with these little situations that are bound to come up. But for the most part they oppose it because consequences, that’s why. Conservatives want to see bad people be miserable, more miserable than they are themselves, because to them that’s fairness: sorting out the good people from the bad people and reveling in how bad the bad people have it.
schrodinger's cat
@Paul in KY: I have to agree. Controlling women and their sexuality is the primary purpose of most fundamentalist religion, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Don’t know enough about Buddhism to comment.
ETA: The essence of conservatism is preserving privilege. Gender privilege is one of the biggest of those.
Mark B.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: One of the hallmarks of Republican genius is the ability to hold conflicting thoughts without any visible signs of cognitive dissonance.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: That’s the nature of the ‘control’. Make the ‘slut’ who had the temerity to have a sexual relationship (outside of marriage) reap the whirlwind & have to carry the pregnancy. Maybe she dies? Object lesson there to other ‘would-be-sluts’.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: I suppose so. I think “may the bad people suffer greatly, for I am a good person and suffer enough” is the overarching principle.
rikyrah
No less than The Evil One already told you..
“Deficits don’t matter.”
catclub
@schrodinger’s cat:
It would be interesting to think of this in the context of Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel.
He mentions that religion and fanatical armies come about as civilizations get bigger and more organized.
Brandon
And Pete Peterson returns once again to his hibernation chamber waiting for another Democratic President to be elected.
TG Chicago
Explaining deficit chicken-littles is easy.
WHAT PARTY HOLDS THE PRESIDENCY?
If Republican, ignore the deficit
If Democratic, complain about the deficit. Not because you give a shit about the deficit, but because you can stymie any legislation the Democrat puts forward by screeching about the deficit. Even if the legislation has nothing to do with the deficit, you can still complain that the Democrat is wasting time by not focusing on the number one existential threat to our baby children: the deficit.
The press will enable this, since they think it makes them look serious when they furrow their brows and nod along to the Republican deficit screeching. I mean, everybody knows that the Republicans are the party that’s serious about the deficit! They will forget to care about the deficit as soon as Republicans stop hollering about it, which will be when a Republican again holds the presidency.
My guess as to the current Kabuki: they know that constant deficit screeching will eventually wear out, plus they’ve basically ensured that nothing will get done in congress for the next year and a half. They’re making a show of not complaining about it now so that when Hillary takes over (possibly with a Senate majority), they can resume screeching. If the screeching was nonstop, it might not get as much attention in 2017. They’re counting on the press to take them seriously again when it’s time to put the brakes on progress.
And if somehow a Republican becomes president, when they start lowering taxes on the rich and doubling military spending, they can say “hey, we haven’t been screeching about the deficit for years! And you know that we’re the party that’s serious about the deficit”
Sherparick
@redshirt: Making Liberals mad and unhappy and putting “those People” in their proper place. This is what Scott Walker delivered in Wisconsin and was promising to deliver to the the country. Unfortunately for Scott, he was run over and left as road kill by two guys willing to go even farther outraging liberals, hippies, immigrants, environmentalists, union members, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics: Trump and Carson
…What happened was that Donald Trump came to seem like a much more powerful agent of revenge. Walker’s vengeance was in the past, but Trump’s was in the present — he was currently infuriating the political world (and anyone who criticized him) with his low but effective cheap schoolyard attacks.
So Walker lost the revanchist vote to Trump — and at the same time, voters in search of a quiet, deeply Christian detester of liberalism gravitated to Ben Carson, who isn’t sullied by having held elected office and whose blackness probably gives GOP voters a frisson of excitement that his actual personality doesn’t provide.
Horserace journalists say that every candidate occupies a “lane,” but most straddle a couple of lanes. Walker was in exactly two — and in each one an outsider roared past him. So he was left in the dust.”
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2015/09/walker-minus-trump-minus-carson-0.html#links
Moslerfan
Some Republicans at least understand the role deficits play in stimulating the economy, and have used deficit spending effectively to that end. Bush II used tax rebates to quickly shut down recession in 2000. I don’t think he understood what he was doing, but I’m convinced his chief of staff Andy Card did.