It seems like everywhere you look, there is another republican yahoo talking about the jobs and recovery bill as "generational theft" in one of the most unintentionally hilarious and ironic phrases every to come out of the right wing noise machine.
Who is coming up with this? This, in addition to being comedy gold, is one of the best ways to draw a contrast between the Obama administration, the current Democratic Congress, their ideas and priorities and those of the Bush administration, these very same Congressional republicans who presided over the largest deficits and true generational theft in history. These robber baron republicans of the past decade or so (maybe even more, actually) have gone one better though - they not only stole from this generation, the next generation and the one after that, but they stole from the prior generation and the one before that.
Don’t believe me? Well, think about this:
Was the Medicare drug bill that was passed only by lying about the price tag by a few hundred billion and then holding the vote open for hours while arms were twisted and no doubt a few bribes or threats occurred an example of generational theft from seniors and the current generations who are footing the bill to the benefit of the pharma and insurance companies?
Was the $9 billion that went missing in Iraq or the billions of dollars in weapons intended for Iraqi security forces but "went missing" or the billions of dollars per month sunk into an occupation that everyone knows was based on a lie not generational theft from future generations that will be paying for this?
Was a half trillion deficit run up by the Bush administration and the republican controlled Congress or the massive tax cuts for the ultra wealthy (including cuts in the estate tax and capital gains tax rates, which benefit the top 1% by an overwhelming amount at the expense of the middle class) not generational theft from the current and future generations by diverting billions of dollars from those who work for a living to those who accumulate wealth for a living?
Were the huge corporate tax cuts to big oil and relaxation of regulations that allowed Wall Street to cheat the system with fake financials while paying themselves millions in bonuses and tax credits for outsourcing American jobs to other countries and cuts to education funding or assistance not generational theft from the current and next generation?
If someone mentions "generational theft", I would be willing to bet that, regardless of the person saying it or the context in which it is used, this current jobs and recovery bill isn’t going to come to mind. Rather, it is fairly obvious that the massive shift in wealth to the top 1% of this country and the largest gap in wages in decades that caused millions of families to be in dire financial straits will come to most people’s minds.
So if republicans want to keep using that term, that is fine by me – we should all be eager to point out exactly what "generational theft" really is, and how ironic it is that the republican party is using that term nowadays.