Nothing illustrates the utter hypocrisy of the Republican Party more than the tax cuts which were just passed in the United States. Republicans used to be classical economists. They officially believed in balanced budgets. That changed when Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes assumed the presidency. Jonathan Chait writes:
The official conservative party line during the Reagan era, when Republicans introduced the modern phenomenon of the large structural deficit, was that it was necessary to run the red ink in order to win the Cold War. Then, under George W. Bush, the response to the 9/11 attacks became the new rationale: don’t ya know there’s a war on terror? Notably, and in keeping with the anti-intellectual spirit of the times, conservatives have not even bothered formulating a rationale for increasing the deficit during the peak of an economic expansion. They’re doing it for the same reason they’re undertaking every other abuse of power during the Trump era: because they can.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, there is Republican red ink as far as the eye can see:
CBO now estimates the 2018 deficit will be $242 billion higher than it had estimated last June, before the tax cuts. And the tax cut is the major reason: “Accounting for most of that difference is a $194 billion reduction in projected revenues, mainly because the 2017 tax act is expected to reduce collections of individual and corporate income taxes.”
The deficit is expected to grow to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. That would make sense if the country was spending to counteract a serious but temporary emergency, like a recession or perhaps a major war. There is no such emergency, though.
When there was an emergency, and Barack Obama ran deficits in response to the Great Recession, the Republican line was that Obama's deficits had put Western Civilization on the edge of oblivion:
Republicans treated deficits of this scale as dangerous portents of civilizational collapse during Barack Obama’s first term, when the economy was recovering from the greatest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century.
Their theory is simple and the ugliest of lies: When Democrats run deficits it's a sign of their evil intent. When we do it, we're -- as we always have been -- on the side of the angels.
It's the same stuff that comes out of the back end of a cow.
Image: bankersadda.com
