The Danger Of Republican Deficits-- Despite Reagan, Cheney And Boehner

Last Friday only a dozen Republicans had the brains-- or the guts-- to vote for Peter Welch's Home Star Energy Retrofit Act, which, if the conservatives don't kill it in the Senate, will among other things "provide rebates to contractors to be passed through as discounts to homeowners who retrofit their homes to achieve energy savings." The press dubbed it "cash for caulkers," and it will probably prove to be as popular and successful as the cash for clunkers program the GOP also tried to block.

Both are meant to stimulate the economy while targeting specific areas: the first, a faltering (now recovering) auto sector, and the new one, energy efficiency and the faltering construction industry. Needless to say that among the dozen conservatives who did cross the aisle to vote with the Democrats-- Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), Joe Barton (R-TX), Judy Biggert (R-IL), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Dave Camp (R-MI), Anh Cao (R-LA), Republican Senate nominee Mike Castle (DE), Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Ralph Hall (R-TX), Tim Murphy (R-PA), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Carefully avoiding any controversy, GOP gubernatorial candidates Gresham Barrett (SC), Pete Hoekstra (MI) and Zach Wamp (TN), as well as Blue Dog Senate candidate Charlie Melancon (LA), avoided the vote entirely. Needless to say, the screaming memies who pass for Republican House leadership like John Boehner (OH), Mike Pence (IN), Eric Cantor (VA) and Thaddeus McCotter (MI) all voted "no" and continued leading their clueless lemmings in knee-jerk opposition.

Boehner dragged his sorry ass off the golf course to climb up on a soapbox and shriek about the deficit he has been so involved in creating since 1990: “Even though the ‘stimulus’ last year included $15 billion for weatherization, which is largely unspent, they decided to add another $6.6 billion for caulk to our deficit, at time when the American people are already scared to death by Washington Democrats’ out-of-control spending spree." Boehner loves screeching about the deficit-- except when Republicans are in charge, which is when he loves running deficits up by going on insane and irresponsible spending binges that have been likened to what drunken sailors do on shore leave.

We'll come back to that in a moment. First a note about how Boehner and the GOP leadership have been playing the teabaggers for suckers:

Perhaps no Republican politician has been quite so eager to bring the Tea Partiers into the GOP fold as House minority leader John Boehner. At the Conservative Political Action Convention in February, Boehner announced, “We're going to listen to the Tea Party movement. While the other side is busy mocking the Tea Party movement, we're going to listen to them, we're going to walk amongst them, we're going to stand with them." With such professions of solidarity, Boehner appeared to be one of the Tea Partiers' biggest fans—that is, until they asked him to put his support in writing.

The latest squabble between the Tea Partiers and Boehner grew from an attempt by a national Tea Party umbrella group to resurrect the 1994 Contract With America--a conservative legislative agenda that former House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich deployed to launch the Republican revolution and take over the House. This time, the Tea Partiers wanted the people to write the contract, not the politicians. So they spent months soliciting ideas from the public online, and then submitted the best ones to a vote that garnered more than 400,000 participants. On Tax Day, the Tea Party Patriots unveiled their new "Contract From America," a list of 10 priorities they want candidates and members of Congress to commit to... [D]espite Boehner's enthusiastic words about the Tea Partiers, he has refused to sign the document. Instead, he released a statement patting the activists on the back for their amateur effort at national agenda-setting. He said, "This document is just the latest example of how the Tea Party movement has done this nation a great service by giving Americans who believe their government is no longer listening to them a platform to come together that transcends party and ideology. Republican elected officials must continue to listen to them, stand with them, and walk among them. Every lawmaker-- Republican, Democrat, and Independent-- should consider the 'Contract from America' required reading and heed its call for a return to the principles on which our nation was founded."

But the Tea Party organizers didn't want Boehner to encourage people to read the contract. They wanted him to sign it. Two weeks later, Boehner still hadn’t touched the document, and Tea Partiers suspect they know why. Boehner and company are working on a contract of their own—to be launched in September to kick off the midterm congressional elections in earnest.

And that's Boehner, a slippery and unprincipled partisan, looking to score points and win the speakership without actually committing to anything. His hogwash about controlling deficits is absolutely outlandish, carefully crafted, but baseless Republican talking points that are never born out in the reality that Republicans always avoid. A hat tip to everybody's favorite villain, Dick Cheney, who will long be remembered for telling us-- when his paws were on the spigot-- that "Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter." Cheney's administration put their our money where his mouth was, running up the largest debt in history, nearly bankrupting the country and millions of families and small businesses.

Suddenly, when a new president is voted in to clean up the mess left behind by Bush, Cheney and congressional Republicans led by Boehner and McConnell, the binge spenders are hysterical over the very deficits that Bill Clinton had eliminated from the last run of GOP irresponsible redistribution of the wealth-- upwards-- by cutting taxes on the rich, subsidizing big corporations and military expansion and cutting essential services. Thom Hartmann dealt with this well in Threshold:

Now, of course, as we're paying about $1,000 per family per year in taxes just to cover the interest payments of the nearly $3 trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) national debut Reagan ran up (and then spent during the 1980s to create the appearance of prosperity in the United States) and an additional $2,000 per working family per year for the added $5 trillion debt the two presidents Bush ran up [with solid and unwavering support from Boehner and the entire Republican Party congressional delegation who are squealing like stick pigs since Obama took office], we're discovering that deficits do matter. The U.S. government under just three presidents, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, borrow in your name over $30,000 (for every man, woman, and child in America), and the people we borrowed it from (China, Saudi Arabia, wealthy U.S. families like the Bushes) fully expect to be repaid that debt with interest.

These debts matter so much, in fact, that their cost has brought to a virtual screeching halt investment in infrastructure and quality-of-life government spending in the United States. We've even had to sell off our roads and bridges to Spanish and Australian companies (to turn them into toll roads) because our eroded tax base and huge public debut load have made it difficult to maintain them.

For the very wealthy in the United States-- those three hundred-thousand or so families who earn more than a million dollars (and in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars) every year-- there's a certain truth to multimillionaire Cheney's assertion that deficits don't matter. These families don't use much of the public infrastructure we pay for with our tax dollars. Their children don't go to public schools. They fly on private jets rather than commercial airlines that use public airport facilities. They never use mass or public transportation. Their food is from the very best sources, so they don't need to worry about contamination, and their medical care is provided in private hospitals and by physicians who operate boutique services just for the very rich. They never shop in the local mall, they don't worry about crime as they live in gated and guarded communities, and their children almost never go into the military.

If the country's debt causes-- as it has-- a steady erosion in the commons, these wealthy families believe that it doesn't much matter to them. And most of them have a sizable portion of their cash stashed in U.S. government bonds-- like the trust George W. Bush was born with-- which is the very debut I've just mentioned. They're the ones we owe the money to, and when it's repaid to them, their income from those bonds is most often not taxed at all, or at a very low rate. So, in fact, a huge government debt is arguably good for the dynastic families of America.

The Democrat running for the western Ohio seat Boehner has been occupying all these years is Justin Coussoule, who has been endorsed by Blue America. One of the reasons he's seeking to replace Boehner is because of his profligate attitude towards the taxes working families pay. "It is amazing," he told us, "that Congressman Boehner, after remaining mute for over two decades, has finally found his voice regarding budget deficits. He uttered nary a word about hundreds of ‘no-bid’ Halliburton contracts or our two wars that were simply deemed ‘off budget.’ Getting balanced-budget religion now-- after his party inherited a balanced budget in 2001 and then nearly drove our nation into fiscal receivership-- would be laughable if not so self-serving.”

Natalie Mosher is another serious-minded progressive Democrat running against a Republican hypocrite who leads his party's congressional caucus and helped lead the country to financial straits: Thaddeus McCotter, in Oakland County outside Detroit. Like Coussoule, she's disappointed in her district's representative and his partisan game-playing. "Thaddeus McCotter was a leading culprit promoting the soaring Bush era deficits and owes us an apology for the mess he helped create."