Because someone must be on crack or really, really wealthy to buy the garbage that Tim Pawlenty is trying to peddle. In desperation he is seizing on the far-right lunatic surge that has propelled the Republican Party. He attacked Obama today for his "third rate" policies:
“The addiction to spending must be brought to a halt, and we must have a president who has a growth agenda,” Mr. Pawlenty, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said in a speech at the University of Chicago. “The president is satisfied with a second-rate American economy produced by his third-rate policies. I’m not.”
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/...
But wait just a minute here. How can any Republican lecture anyone on economic policies? Their policies have been in place for the better part of thirty years and look at the havoc it has wrought upon the American economy. However, when Pawlenty spells out his own fixes you begin to wonder if the real addiction is the whole Republican Party smoking crack. His policies are just Ronnie and Double Bush on crack:
In the speech, which his aides described as a major economic policy address, Mr. Pawlenty urged a reduction in business income tax rates to 15 percent, from 35 percent. Under his plan, individual federal income taxes would be flattened to just two rates: 10 percent for the first $50,000 of income and 25 percent for income above that threshold. He also urged elimination of all taxes on capital gains.
In addition to broad tax cuts, Mr. Pawlenty said that as president he would seek temporary authority to freeze government spending and to impound up to 5 percent of the federal budget until the nation’s budget is balanced. He said he would wage an “unrelenting trench battle against the overregulation that’s suffocating America’s entrepreneurial spirit.” And he called for cuts in programs that are better done by private companies.
He went on to explain further:
“We can start by applying what I call the Google test,” he said. “If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.” As examples he cited the Postal Service, Amtrak and federal home-mortgage agencies.
In other words he is telling all but a small percentage of America this. We WILL all pay the whole bill for the wealthy elites crashing our economy and they will not pay anything. In fact they are going to take even more and we are going to pay for that too. We will not be getting Social Security or Medicare either because they are giving that to themselves. We wil be working for low wages for some greedy asshole like them and the government will not be employing anyone and paying middle-class wages with benefits. While they are at it we ARE going to shut the hell up and just work in any environment THEY see fit.
And the real thing is that they ignore the fact that their policies brought us here in the first place. All their arguments are a lie born of their own greed. Their policies are radical versions of trickle-down which did not work and the disasterous Bush Tax Cuts. The real truth is that these policies ignore the real problems with our economy and they DO NOT produce economic growth:
Between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.
Growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion.
The tax cuts were supposed to encourage business investment, but nonresidential fixed investment increased a meager 2.1% annually—a third of the average increase and less than half that of the next poorest post-war increase in business investment on record.
http://www.epi.org/...
And in fact as all Republicans do Pawlenty gets the problem exactly in reverse. That is because the problem with our economy is not that people like him do not have enough money, it is because the folks he whores for have not "trickled it" down. The real problem is that most Americans have fewer dollars to contribute to the economy because of the greed of the few:
Inflation-adjusted median weekly earnings fell by 2.3% during the economic expansion from 2001Q4 to 2007Q4.12. Over this same period, nonfarm business productivity (output per hours worked) increased 15.4%;13 in essence,
wage growth became further decoupled from productivity growth.
Between 2002 and 2007, real hourly earnings fell 1.7% for men in the bottom 10th percentile of wage earnings, fell 0.4% for men in the 50th wage percentile, and increased 2.4% for men in the 90th wage percentile, continuing a trend of very uneven wage growth.
The bottom 90% of earners were left with just 13% of total income gains, significantly less income than the 24% captured by the top 0.01% (those with incomes above $9.5 million).
However, the most hypocritical part of all this remains. As Republicans whine about the debt and insist everyone but themselves sarcrifice, it is actually their excess that they have forced us to pay for once, and now threaten to again:
From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt,25 nearly 50% of the total debt accrued during this period.
Making the changes permanent would cost about $4.6 trillion over the 2012-21 period.
Just allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would put public debt on a sustainable trajectory over the next decade, maintaining a constant share of the economy through the entire 10-year period.
In other words these folks picked you clean for thirty years. They outsourced your jobs to slave markets. They picked at the government trough until it was clean and crashed our economy. Now they want us not only to sacrifice all they have already taken but even more. They want us to work with low wages, no benefits and no regulations upon them.
Their vision is Reagan and both Bushes on crack and America better not be smoking with them this time around. We have not recovered from the damage they did the first time, let alone able to afford any more. We simply cannot allow them to steal away anything that helps average America like they did the wealth. I just hope we do not continue cowering as a country and letting them have their way.
Comments are closed on this story.