Romans Spent Years Building, Nero Spent a Few Hours Fiddling

A different kind of crumbling being ignored by the GOP.

I'm sure Nero's fiddling sounded something like this:

"[Obama has] the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt.”--Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus

Steve Benen does his usual great job chipping through that old outcropping of bullshit.

...just last week, congressional Republicans pushed for a package of tax breaks that would cost $440 billion over the next decade. How would GOP lawmakers pay for this? They wouldn’t... 

President Obama has overseen the fastest deficit reduction seen in the United States since the end of World War II. For that matter, nearly all of the president’s agenda – Affordable Care Act, immigration reform, etc. – would actually improve the nation’s finances. 

...turned a massive surplus into a massive deficit, putting two wars, two tax breaks, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national charge card, leaving the bill for future generations. 

...public debt grew under Reagan – who promised as a candidate to balance the federal budget – by 186%. 

...H.W. Bush increased the debt by 55%, Clinton by 37% (he’s the only modern president to see surpluses), W. Bush by 86%, and Obama by 59%.

Benen doesn't even mention that most of the debt accumulation under Obama can be laid squarely at the feet of GW Bush, as shown by this well-known-outside-the-conservative-bubble chart.

So, at a time when Republicans' precious free markets are screaming at us to invest in infrastructure (low fuel, materials, labor, and borrowing costs), we are, instead of borrowing and spending on infrastructure that more than pays for itself like any good CEO would do now, watching little corporate piss ants like Reince Preibus give millions of wingnuts a talking point to drop like a bomb while they run away from the real fight.

But the frame is set that Democrats are free spenders, so the GOP looks thrifty while the country literally crumbles.

Wingnuts Say Obama Has Exploded US Debt Which Is, Unfortunately, Wrong

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis
based on CBO estimates.

The more I listen to elected Republicans, who, thank goodness, just won't stop talking, the more I realize that they're bullshitters. They must know basic facts like the size of US deficits and debt. They must know that the deficit is falling. They must know that the current debt cannot, in any honest economic sense of the word, be blamed on President Obama. But they don't care. They have an impression they want to make, so they don't care what's true and what's not. They just say whatever they have to say in order to convey the impression they want to make, which is, of course, that Democrats are big borrowers and spenders, and they are the party of fiscal responsibility.

Of course, anyone with even a loose grasp of facts knows why this is bullshit. But, apparently, some people still need help with the facts. So, occasionally, I set people straight. It's especially fun to set wingnuts straight, although it gets old when you point out how wrong they are, and they just disappear, only to come back some other day with more bullshit that shows that they just ignored the actual facts.

Today, I see that Bloomberg has a poll that illustrates this break with reality that Tea Party Republicans have suffered, and continue to suffer, because they believe the BS from the people they elected. They allow the impression being made by the bullshitters to take root in their walled off minds, and they pick and choose the information they need to feed that impression until it festers into a boil that sorely needs to be lanced. If only they weren't so afraid of needles.

Two-thirds of regular Republicans believe the federal budget deficit has grown this year and 93 percent of Tea Party Republicans agree. Both are wrong; the budget deficit is projected to fall this year from $1.1 trillion to $642 billion.

That's just this year. Go back a ways, and their delusion gets even stronger. For example, tell them Obama has cut the deficit in half since he took office from GW Bush, and they often become apoplectic, if they don't just leave and avoid the subject. They'll wail about how Obama sent the deficit soaring to such heights that even he could keep it up.

So, the real kicker is when you show them what the money is for. Like any good bullshitter, they'll say I'm a weak, pathetic libtard for blaming Bush. When the truth is, for centuries in this country, those described as weak and pathetic were the ones who knowingly chose to believe fantasy over reality. I'm looking at you, Confederate States of America.

The chart at the top of this post lists the sources of the current deficits that are adding to our debt. It is a stark reminder of the fact that any Republican who claims they are the party of limited government is bullshitting you and will probably ask for a campaign contribution right after doing so. The entire GOP has become a country club of con artists, and their base is the mark.

Source: ZFacts

The chart at the right is the one that should be shoved in the face of any bullshitting wingnut who dares to suggest that Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility. And note that anyone capable of putting chart A and chart B together will realize that the debt spike under Obama is really legacy spending from that codpiece wearing hero of the Mission Accomplished wingnuts, GW Bush, from his wars (the Iraq war will eventually cost over $6 trillion), his tax cuts (which we were told would create millions of jobs and resulted in the worst job creation record on record), TARP (started by Bush and finished by Obama, but only necessary because of Bush), recovery measures from the Little Bush Depression (like the stimulus, which was one-third tax cuts, something Republicans refuse to believe), and the reduced revenues due to the Little Bush Depression.

One last fact to keep in mind on this last graph: When calculating debt as a percent of GDP, it's important to remember that GW Bush's final GDP, in 4Q2008, was negative 9%. When GDP spikes down like that, and emergency spending goes up (job losses were at 800,000 per month when Obama took office and  in the three months before the stimulus passed, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers), the debt as a percent of GDP will, of course, go up. To blame that on Obama is the ultimate in bullshit.

"Private fixed investment as a percentage of potential GDP.
When it gets back to historical norms, the free lunch
on infrastructure investment will be over."
Neil Irwin, Washington Post

What this whole argument misses is that cutting the deficit right now is the worst thing to do. We should be be doing what the Congressional Progressive Caucus's People's Budget would do: borrow more at currently low interest rates, buy cheap materials, and put unemployed people back to work fixing our crumbling infrastructure, which would more than pay for itself. This won't happen, of course, as long as the GOP controls the House. But if they keep spewing their bullshit, and enough people learn the truth, maybe we can extend the half life of their polling plunge, take advantage of the hidden weakness of gerrymandering, and then keep the bullshitters talking long enough to replace them with some people who want to put this country back to work.