Tag: Deficits

Paul Ryan Caught on Tape: ‘We’re Not Going to Give Up on Destroying the Health Care System for the American People’

Jon Ponder

Remember Kinsley’s rule: In Washington, a gaffe is when someone accidentally tells the truth:

Republican House Budget Committee Chairman PAUL RYAN: “This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on, because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.”

The “new” Republican budget released by Ryan, the infamous zombie-eyed granny starver, is the same as the old budget he drafted — it voucherizes Medicare, repeals Obamacare and the rest. Why would Republicans phone in a new budget that’s the same as the budget that is unpopular in the polls and was rejected by Congress?

Paul Krugman cuts to the heart of it:
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Paging GoDaddy’s CEO – Elephant Down: California Republican Party Attempts Suicide

Jon Ponder

art-sad-elephant“I once shot an elephant in my pajamas,” the old Groucho Marx joke goes, “how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Speaking of shooting elephants, last week GoDaddy CEO Bob “Dumbo” Parsons posted a video from his African safari vacation showing him stalking and gunning down a perfectly healthy elephant. On the video, Parsons is heard saying, “Of everything that I do this is the most rewarding.” Unlike Groucho, he was not joking.

This caused blowback for Parsons and GoDaddy, the massive domain registrar and web services company he founded, mainly because it’s been decades since hunting animals as huge and non-threatening as elephants was considered “sport.” (You can weigh in here by signing a petition titled “Real Men Don’t Kill Elephants.”)

Instead of killing a real elephant, it’s too bad Parsons can’t act out his Great White Hunter fantasies in a virtual world by grabbing his gun and elephant pajamas and heading to Sacramento, where a figurative old bull elephant called the California GOP is on its last legs and needs to be put out of its misery.

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Lockyear on Texas’ Hidden $27 Bil Deficit: Someone Turned on the Lights in the Bar and Texas ‘Doesn’t Look So Pretty Anymore’

Jon Ponder

Someone just turned the lights on in the bar, and the sexiest state doesn’t look so pretty anymore.

– California Treasurer Bill Lockyear, a Democrat, reacting to news that Texas had been hiding a $27 billion deficit for over a year while both Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry and California GOP candidate for governor Meg Whitman lambasted California’s deficit and touted Texas as a “miracle” of fiscal responsibility.

Cheney Was Referring to the Bush Tax Cuts When He Said, ‘Reagan Proved Deficits Don’t Matter’ – But Even Bush Had Doubts about Them in 2002

Jon Ponder

O'Neill, Cheney
O'Neill, Cheney
Eight years ago this month, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was asked to resign. O’Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, had made a couple of gaffes, including one that temporarily caused a run on the dollar. But it was his opposition to the administration’s plan to give tax cuts to the wealthy — O’Neill worried the cuts might cause the federal deficit to balloon out of control — that got him canned.

Not long after O’Neill left office, author Ron Suskind wrote a book about O’Neill’s tenure as Treasury secretary titled, “The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.” The book made headlines when it was published in late 2003, because, in it, O’Neill became the first high-ranking official from the administration to say publicly that war with Iraq had been a top objective of the Bush administration from the outset, and that the Sept. 11 attacks had merely provided a pretext for the invasion.

“Haven’t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut’s gonna do it again. Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?”
– Bush in 2002

(It was also around this time that Ron Suskind reported on a conversation he’d had with an anonymous senior White House aide — now universally thought to have been Karl Rove. “The aide said that guys like me,” Suskind wrote, “were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which [Rove] defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”)

But the other controversial revelation in Suskind’s book was about the Bush administration’s reckless decision after the 2002 midterms to go for a second round of tax cuts for the rich. In a January 2004 article about the book, Julian Borger wrote in the Guardian:

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