The Boys Who Cried Debt: The Case Against Cuts

[marmar]

(pdf file)



by Joseph M. Schwartz, Democratic Left magazine, the publication of the Democratic Socialists of America:


Republicans and conservative Democrats are whipping up public hysteria about the debt ceiling and the size of the federal deficit to justify cutting social programs that benefit the middle and working class. These scare tactics are hypocritical because conservatives militantly pushed for these same cuts when the federal budget was in surplus during the Clinton administration. The United States is not broke. The long-term deficit problem has not been caused by wasteful social spending, as the right contends, but by conservatives’ 30-year project of starving federal, state and local governments of revenue via tax cuts for the affluent and for corporations. As conservative activist Grover Norquist quipped during the Reagan era, the goal of the right is to reduce the size of government and drown it in the bathtub. Of course, the “deficit problem” can readily be fixed without cutting Social Security or Medicare if we enact government policies that force the rich and corporations to pay their fair share in taxes and that curtail wasteful “defense” spending.

The Republican leadership never tells the public that well over half of the deficit spending from 2008-11 has nothing to do with the Obama administration’s policies. Rather, it is due to the lost revenue from the Bush tax cuts and excessive military spending, including $170 billion per year in “off-budget” expenditures on the unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stimulus spending and the bailout of financial institutions make up another 30 percent of the deficit spending of that period, with tax revenue shortfalls due to the recession constituting the remaining 20 percent. Much of these funds will be recovered if and when economic growth resumes. In contrast, drastic cuts to spending on vital social services will only prolong the recession.

If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling in early August, the federal government will immediately be unable to pay 30 percent of its bills, including Social Security and Medicare payments. The United States Treasury has never defaulted on bond payments, and it probably won’t this summer. But even a brush with default could send the global economy into a tailspin that might make the Great Recession look trivial. But Republicans and conservative Democrats are willing to play with fire because they want to use the threat of default to justify cutting government spending on basic social services. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dsausa.org/dl/Summer_2011_content/Boys%20Who%20Cried.pdf

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[MissDeeds]

2. The "conservative Democrats"

should be voted out of office and replaced with real Democrats. There is enough pandering to the right going on in the oval office, we don't need them joining in.

K&R