Bill Scher at the Campaign for America's Future noticed that Senator Mitch McConnell was touting his proposal for a spending reduction commission on CNN Sunday. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
The fact is the only way to eliminate deficits solely by cutting spending alon[e] is to completely hobble our retirement security, shred our social safety net, condemn us to energy dependence, prevent the next generation from competing in the global economy and ensure a jobless recovery.
And there is no way conservatives are willing to spell that out and have a honest debate about their dark vision for an austere America.
The conservative movement is eager to shift the frame of debate away from how to deliver on the mandate for progressive change that swept Obama into office, and towards a debate on who can gut government the most.
And the purpose of gutting government ultimately is so they can keep feeding more tax cuts to the folks who have been getting taxes cut for the past four decades. Their excuse is the deficit, and, of course, the accumulation of deficits, known as the national debt. The $988 billion national debt that Ronald Reagan nearly tripled in two terms. The $5.7 trillion debt that George W. Bush nearly doubled in two terms. As James Kwak points out:
...what is it in [Obama]'s proposed budget that the Republicans are aiming at? The plan to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for people making more than $250,000 per year. In other words, the problem with the Obama budget is that the deficits are too high, and the solution is to cut taxes. Huh?
Huh, indeed.
Where was McConnell and the rest of what has become the Party of No Way, No How when the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were made and the phony rationale for the trillion-dollar (so far) Iraq war was being concocted in Dick Cheney's bunker? Thye were greasing the skids and cheering on the largest period of deficit-spending in U.S. history. Suddenly they've all got fiscal religion. Just the way they always do when it's a Democrat instead of one of them sitting in the Oval Office.