EXPOSING THE RIGHT'S DEFICIT SHAM - Washington Monthly

[JohnWxy]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_07/024716.php


We talked last week about a trend that's hard to overlook: every time Democrats push legislation that lowers the deficit, Republican lawmakers and their conservative allies oppose it. Given that the right likes to pretend that deficit reduction is a top priority, it seems like there's a disconnect here.

This morning, http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/conservatives-dont-care-about-the-deficit-4/">Matt Yglesias goes further, trying to make it painfully obvious that, nonsensical rhetoric notwithstanding, conservatives really don't care about deficit reduction. Here's the easy-to-understand, five-point indictment:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it's a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn't be offset by other changes in spending.
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