The Big Fat GOP Budget Lie

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



The Big Fat GOP Budget Lie
July 29, 2011

At every turn of the debt-ceiling battle, Republicans repeat the talking point that Washington doesn’t have a “revenue problem,” but a “spending problem” – as if saying so makes it true. But the reality is that today’s debt crisis is driven more by George W. Bush’s tax cuts than anything else, as Sam Parry explains.

By Sam Parry


Sometimes you just have to call something what it is. Simply put, congressional Republicans are lying about the federal budget crisis and thus are suffocating America’s chance for an open, honest debate about the tough choices that are ahead.

The GOP’s bogus argument is built on the oft-repeated sound bite that the federal deficit is a spending problem, not a revenue problem. That isn’t true, as the data and U.S. history plainly show. The current budget deficit is MOSTLY a revenue problem.

The most pronounced shift in budget calculations is that federal revenue has dropped from 20.35 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2000 – when the U.S. government was running a surplus – to 14.41 percent of GDP today, with the projected deficit for fiscal 2011 at about $1.5 trillion.

A fair-minded review of the budget shows, too, that most of the contributions from the spending side of the ledger have almost nothing to do with President Barack Obama or what is typically described as “reckless spending” in Washington on domestic priorities. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2011/07/29/the-big-fat-gop-budget-lie/