{"id":4203,"date":"2011-03-03T05:36:59","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T13:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=4203"},"modified":"2011-03-03T05:49:54","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T13:49:54","slug":"republican-liars-claim-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/03\/republican-liars-claim-poverty\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican Liars Claim Poverty"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States is not about to go broke.\u00a0 No state is about to declare bankruptcy.\u00a0 So why then are Republicans complaining that the opposite is true?\u00a0 Because lying is what Republicans do.\u00a0 If they told the truth only the top 2% and a few racist hate mongers would vote for them.\u00a0 Most of the deficit problems that do exist, on both state and federal levels, are the direct consequence of Republican giveaways to the rich and to criminal corporations, but Republicans want to impose the sacrificing on the rest of us.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"gop-lies\"\u201cWe\u2019re broke! We\u2019re broke!<\/strong>\u201d Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re broke in this state<\/strong>,\u201d Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. \u201cNew Jersey\u2019s broke<\/strong>,\u201d Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a \u201clooming bankruptcy,\u201d Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal [Murdoch delinked] on Tuesday<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends<\/strong>. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more \u201cbroke\u201d than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich<\/strong>. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, to cite just the latest example, House Republicans successfully pressured the Senate to approve a bill cutting $4 billion in spending just to keep the federal government from shutting down for the next two weeks. In a matter of days, the Senate will be forced to take up the House bill to make more than $61 billion in ruinous cuts over the next seven months, all under the pretext of \u201cfiscal responsibility.\u201d (At least the White House says it will be involved in the next round.) Many Republican governors are employing the same tactic.<\/p>\n

But now voters are starting to notice the effects of these cuts and to get angry at the ideological overreach<\/strong>. A New York Times\/CBS News poll published on Tuesday<\/a> showed that Americans oppose ending bargaining rights for public unions by a majority of nearly two to one. And the poll sharply refutes the post-Reagan Republican mantra that the public invariably abhors all tax increases. Nearly twice as many people said they would prefer a tax increase to cutting benefits of public employees or to cutting spending on roads<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n

Republicans benefit for the exclusive benefit of the richest 2% and criminal corporations.\u00a0 If you are neither of these, supporting Republicans opposes your own self-interest.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States is not about to go broke.\u00a0 No state is about to declare bankruptcy.\u00a0 So why then are Republicans complaining that the opposite is true?\u00a0 Because lying is what Republicans do.\u00a0 If they told the truth only the top 2% and a few racist hate mongers would vote for them.\u00a0 Most of the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}