President Obama: [Democrats need to have an] appropriate sense of humility about what we can accomplish; [to that end, I pledge to] spend more time building consensus.”
Mitch McConnell, (R, KY): The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
Day: October 25, 2010
The most you can expect is two years of good old-fashioned gridlock
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) on what to expect if/when the GOP takes the House in November. At least he’s honest.
Eight is Enough
1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.
2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.
3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.
4) The stimulus didn’t work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.
5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.
6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.
7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.
8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.
Old News
Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.
Memo to all assignment editors still employed in the American media apparatus: If you posit that Wikileaks file dumps are inevitably “old news” and thus nothing worth covering, then why aren’t you asking yourself the question that clearly follows: why were those 400,000 documents of “old news” classified in the first place? Where’s an ongoing series about reflexive, pervasive classification and its poisonous impact on any ostensibly free society?
For the American Republic to operate, we ought to expect that a smallish filing cabinet will ultimately be full of the truly dangerous secrets that must be kept. Nuclear bomb designs, the plans for the invasion of Normandy beach next year, and other sensitive documents of that sort are all that should be in there. Instead, “our” government routinely classifies everything, almost certainly still including many aspects of the Normandy beach invasion of 1944. How is a citizen supposed to know anything about the operation of their government? How is a citizen supposed to understand the wages (or even benefits) of these secret decisions, carried out in secret, reported on in secret, and then bundled away inside of another secret which might, just might, show up in heavily redacted form 50 years later, only to be greeted as “old news” by a media all too eager to please its governmental “adversary.”
The answer, of course, is: they are not supposed to.
Step one in any national recovery, any reemergence of sensibility and civic attention is going to have to be: no more blanket secrecy. Period. It’s very easy to know what should be classified as secret in a democracy, and that’s almost nothing. Classification as a general tool (and an inevitable bulwark used to hide the rampant lawlessness of administrations from both parties) obfuscates the outcomes of our own often poisonous and self-defeating policies, the very ones many of us claim to hold dear (while knowing next to nothing about them), and it has got to stop.
Lemkin 