Obama’s Successes Equal Failure in GOP-speak.
March 11, 2013

 
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One job created by the GOPBack when I was in High School, there was this one kid that desperately wanted “the cool kids” to like him. And even though he had friends like me willing to hang out with him, he wouldn’t hesitate to abandon us for the greener pastures of “the in-crowd”… a group that lived to make his life miserable… in the futile hope that he’d convince them to like him. Of course, they never did. They happily invited him over, then instructed him to perform various tasks (from fetching food to doing their homework), all the while ridiculing him behind his back. We tried to tell him he was being used, but he’d have none of it, defending his “friends”, even taking the blame once for something he didn’t do just to keep one of the cool kids out of trouble. Pathetic. I got that same sick feeling in the pit of my stomach last week when President Obama invited a group of Republicans to dinner (again) in hopes of convincing them to stop hating him long enough to get things done. Everyone but Charlie Brown always seems to know Lucy is going to yank the football away, yet he keeps trying. But Lucy was just mean, not demented. It’s not like she went around afterward telling everyone how much better “The Easter Beagle” is at place-kicking. And such was the case on several Sunday shows yesterday. Repeatedly, Republicans pointed to their own failures as “evidence” that President Obama’s policies are a failure. First up, Paul Ryan:

Making an appearance on Fox “news” Sunday Ryan introduced his (third & latest) plan to destroy Medicare by dumping it off on the states, claiming this could save the Federal Government “$770 billion over the next ten years”. Republicans LOVE to play this game… not necessarily with “Medicare” but with ALL government programs… suggesting that the way to “save the Federal government money and reduce the Deficit” is to simply dump every social program off on the states. So YOU… the taxpayer… don’t actually pay less in taxes, you just send the check to a different location (your State Treasurer instead of the Fed). In fact, with the loss of efficiency that comes from consolidating all these programs in one place, there is a VERY good chance… ESPECIALLY if you live in an impoverished Red state… that you’ll end up paying MORE for these services. Meanwhile, Ryan and his ilk get to strut around like peacocks bragging about how they’ve “cut Federal spending” and “reduced the Deficit” without actually improving anything.

But that wasn’t enough. Chris Wallace noted that for the numbers in Ryan’s own budget to work out, he’s depending on the current rate of economic growth under Obama to continue for the next ten years, not plunge into the abyss the way it did the last time we had a Republican president whose solution to every problem was “tax cuts”. Economy good? Tax cut! Economy bad? Tax cuts plus Stimulus Checks! Ryan didn’t dare try and calculate his budget using the rate of economic growth under George W. Bush because he knew it would be impossible. They want us to return to Bush’s policies, but only Obama’s numbers make it possible. It’s not unlike when an insane person thinks they don’t need their meds while they are on them and feeling good.

Repeatedly for the past two months during the “Sequester” fight, I heard Republicans (most notably Speaker Boehner) argue that President Obama “got his tax hike” and therefore additional revenue is “off the table” as a means of closing an “$84 Billion dollar” shortfall in the Budget. Republicans previously put “closing loopholes” and “limiting deductions” on the table as ways to shore-up the Budget to avoid the Sequester. But now that President Obama “got his tax hike in January”, anything other than further budget cuts are off the table.

Problem is, President Obama did NOT get “his” tax hike. He wanted the tax hike to begin on incomes of $250K. Republicans held “the Fiscal Cliff” hostage in exchange for raising the starting amount to “$500K”. Extrapolating from one website that claimed starting the new top tax rate at $250K would raise “only $800 Billion in additional revenue”, and another report saying that starting the top rate at $450K will raise “$396 Billion” in additional revenue, that’s a shortfall of roughly $400 Billion… which would have MORE than made up for the “$84 Billion dollar budget gap”. So once again, Republicans are being obstructionist asshats over a problem of their own creation.

But ABC’s George Will took the cake. Whatever this guy is smoking, it must be strong stuff. On ABC’s “ThisWeek” yesterday, the Roundtable discussion turned to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report announcing that 236,000 jobs were created in February (the shortest month of the year BTW). Not only was this number well above what was “expected” (a number I could not find anywhere), but it’s more than twice the number of jobs the economy must produce each month just to keep up with population growth. The number of people filing new jobless claims fell as well, pushing the unemployment rate down to 7.7%… the lowest since December of 2008 at the height of the collapse on Wall Street. Add to that the fact the adjusted job-creation figures for December were revised up from 196,000 to 219,000 (though January was revised down from 157,000 to 119,000.) For comparison-sake, by this point in George Bush’s presidency, unemployment had gone from 4.2% to 5.4%. (set dates manually at link.) Under Obama, job creation is up, while unemployment, jobless claims and The Deficit are all shrinking… which makes the following comment by ABC’s “ThisWeek” resident Conservative hack George Will all the more mind-numbing:
 

WILL: If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was just 12 months ago, the unemployment rate would be 8.3 percent. If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was when Mr. Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate would be over 10 percent.

 
Think about what George Will is arguing here: job growth under Obama isn’t growing fast enough to to make up for the MILLIONS of jobs lost under President Bush, ergo Obama’s policies are a total failure and we need to return to the Conservative economic policies that got us into this mess in the first place.
 

Kaboom!

 

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March 11, 2013 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Economy, Jobs, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Insanity, Taxes

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