Tax and Spend

Like a worthless, broken record, Republicans are making noises about refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Obama and Democrats support spending cuts. This is another load of crap. Republicans don't want to cut spending. They're just saying this because it's what their constituents want to hear.

"That would inevitably reprise the bitter clash over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, when the government came close to shutting down before lawmakers and the president agreed to a $1.2 trillion package of spending cuts in exchange for Republican agreement to raise the debt ceiling by about the same amount."

Of course the Congress just erased those spending cuts. It's like the New York Times believes we've already forgotten last night's fiscal cliff vote. In fact, most people didn't notice that vote, so they might as well push this lie about a difference between the two parties.

Federal welfare spending reaches 3/4 of a trillion dollars. When it add in state welfare spending, it tops $1 trillion.

Obama lies about cutting spending in 2011, and the media lets him get away with it.

The fiscal cliff deal also increased spending.

"This deal also includes $330.3 billion in new spending over the next decade.  While it does manage to cut only $15 billion (laughable, right?), the agreement expects to gain the government $620 billion in additional revenue.  The Congressional Budget Office did the math on that … that a 41:1 ratio of tax increases to spending cuts."

Republicans are laughing with the Democrat comrades all the way to the bank. Here goes Boortz, feeding into the phony divisiveness of the two parties:

"At the end of the day, this fiscal cliff deal passed by the Congress still increases our deficit by nearly $4 trillion.  But let’s be honest, these tax increases have never, ever been about deficit reduction and always been an obsession of Obama and the Democrats to stick it to these evil rich people.  It’s about class warfare.  It’s about redistributing the wealth."

Baloney. Both parties wanted to increase spending, and both realized that with the American people fed up with trillion dollar deficits, they had to raise taxes. The only question was how to create a theatrical event that made it look like Republicans were resisting tax increases. The plutocrats don't care about these tax increases because they make unimaginably more money off the increased government spending than they pay from these new tax increases. The poor and the middle class are the big losers as our economy spirals downward faster and more of our wealth is transfered to the plutocrats.

Here's more propaganda about how Boehner resisted tax hikes, but Obama won by threatening him.

"President Barack Obama had a warning for John Boehner at a Dec. 13 White House meeting: Stop opposing higher tax rates for top earners, or the president would dedicate his second term to blaming Republicans for a global recession.
The next day, the House speaker called the president and said he was open to a tax rate increase on annual income of more than $1 million."

This is baloney. The top politicians and plutocrats, all of them in agreement to raise taxes as much as possible without anybody losing their jobs, sat down and developed a plan for political theater that would enable Republicans to vote for tax hikes while minimizing their risk of getting voted out in the in the 2014 primary. Then they all they played their parts in the theatrical production before voting for the agreed upon deal on New Years.

Austrians are the opposite of the austerity proponents. The austerity proponents want to tax the people more and cut government spending so governments can pay off the bankers. Austrians say that the people are not responsible for the debts that governments ran up to enrich the politicians, so the government should default.