Nothing to see here:
The Republican Party has largely abandoned its platform of fiscal restraint, pivoting sharply in a way that could add trillions of dollars in federal debt over the next decade.
Cutting spending to balance the budget was almost religion to the Republican Party for much of the past eight years. But all year long, despite their control of the White House and Congress, Republicans have not taken steps to balance the budget, to overhaul entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or to arrest the growth of the country’s $20 trillion in debt.
With the House passing a critical budget resolution this past week, GOP lawmakers are charging forward next week with plans to cut taxes in a way that could add more than $1.5 trillion to the government’s debt over 10 years, with the goal of legislation by early next month. That is on top of an effort to significantly increase military spending. White House officials say their focus is on growing the economy now and dealing with the debt later.
This is nothing new, and not a switch at all. This is the Republican MO, and quite consistent. When they are in power, they spend wildly, enacting irresponsible tax cuts for the rich, blowing up the military budget, and if that doesn’t do the trick, starting a recreational war or two. Then, when they inevitably lose power briefly because of their own hubris, and money is once again tight and the budgets blown out of control from their feckless behavior, they become budget hawks to constrain anything done by liberals.
And the media plays along with it every time, pretending that the GOP and a couple of douchebag bluedogs like Evan Bayh and Harold Ford actually care about the national debt and the deficit. And they fall for it every time. They don’t want to shrink government to the size that they can drown it in the bathtub, they just want to transfer all the money to the Koch and Mercer families bathtubs to roll in it.
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