Boehner says he's seen Gov't avoid addressing the deficit since he's been in D.C. and he's
..."had enough of it." ...
Really??? Well Mr. Boehner -- you were there when the Cheney-shrub regime blew a surplus and took the total public debt to a record high - all to pay for two wars on debt and to give tax cuts going mostly tothe wealthiest few percent in the country.
YOu didn't seem too bothered by massively expanding the public debt then - and for no good reasons. And your votes in Congress back then helped create the infamous Republican Trickle Down Deregulation disaster we have been trying to dig out of which has forced the deficit even higher (the gifts from Republican Trickle - Down Supply Side economics just keep on giving) - while you Republicans have been doing everything you could to sabotage any recovery from this Republican Dystopia we now live in.
Too bad you (and all the other Corporate Lobbyist Party members) didn't start worrying about the public debt BEFORE you massively expanded it!
Paul Krugman had a few words to say on this:
The Undecade
John Boehner speaks:
“At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said Wednesday. “I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to act.”
22 years, huh? Indeed, Boehner was elected in 1990, and entered the House at the beginning of 1991. So what kind of can-kicking was going on during his first, say, decade in office? Here’s the picture:
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Hmm — it sort of looks as if the US was sharply reducing its debt during the presidency of a guy named, I don’t know, Bill something or other.
OK, joking aside, this is important. Republicans have invented a history in which it has been fiscal irresponsibility all along — and far too many centrists have bought into the premise. The reality is that we had low debt and no fiscal problem before Reagan; then an unprecedented surge in peacetime, non-depression deficits under Reagan/Bush; then a major improvement under Clinton; then a squandering of the Clinton surplus via tax cuts and unfunded wars of choice under Bush. And yes, a surge in debt once the Great Recession hit, but that’s exactly when you should be running deficits.
The point about the fake history that expunges the Clinton years is that it turns the budget into a story in which nobody is at fault because everyone is at fault, and the problem is a generic issue of runaway spending. No, it isn’t; we would have come into this crisis with very little debt if the GOP hadn’t always insisted on tax cuts.
= new reply since forum marked as read
without increased Public Sector spending we would have gone right into the second Great Depression, bread lines, soup kitchens and all.
[font size="+1"] NO thanks Mr. Boehner, one Great Depression was enough![/font]
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The Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative: “Between 2001 and 2011, about two-thirds (68 percent) of the $12.7 trillion growth in federal debt has been due to new legislation. Forty percent of this legislative growth was the result of tax cuts enacted after January 2001, and 60 percent resulted from spending increases. Technical and economic revisions combined caused about one quarter (27 percent) of the growth, and changes in other means of financing accounted for 6 percent.
E21: “Roughly half of the reason the surpluses never materialized is that federal spending was subsequently increased (over half of this total increase was concentrated in the three years of 2009-11). A little over one-quarter disappeared because of subsequent corrections to the 2001 projections. Less than one-quarter was due to tax relief of any kind – and only a little more than half of that small fraction is directly attributable to the 2001 and 2003 tax relief packages.”
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time.”
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