My wife and I went out to dinner late on Saturday night. By the time our dessert arrived the two of us and a party of four at the next table were the only customers left in the restaurant. As you might imagine the place was silent except for our six voices chatting away. As a result, we could all hear what everyone else was saying and before long all six of us engaged in friendly chatter about other restaurants and current events.
My wife has a general rule which forbids me from bringing up the subject of politics and I try as much as I can to honor her wishes. However, there are no guidelines or regulations pertaining to answering political questions posed in my direction. One of our fellow diners regaled us with her thoughts on the president and what was wrong with him and the other Democrats in Washington.
According to her, President Obama was responsible for everything from school truancy to poisoning Americans through the use of fluoride in the water supply. While I am being more than a little hyperbolic, she did have a litany of claims which might as well have come from the mouth of Orly Taitz or perhaps Glenn Beck.
When she ultimately brought up her belief that the President was not born in this country, I stopped all discussion with her and having already settled the bill, my wife and I got out of there while speaking as few words as possible. Before that point however, our dining neighbor brought up two points/comments which absolutely left me with my mouth agape.
First she said that President Obama had ruined our economy and he was the first President to preside over an annual trillion-dollar deficit for every year of his presidency. I responded that “yes, during his first three years, the annual deficit has exceeded $1 trillion. However, this was not a deficit of his making and that is was going to take a while to dig us out of this economic hole. Further, if done too quickly, the current recession would most-certainly turn into a depression.” I questioned her on the facts regarding how we got to annual deficits of a trillion dollars yet she refused to see how this had anything to do with unpaid for wars, tax cuts, senior drug benefits or anything else done during the Bush years. She didn’t want to hear anything about President Bush inheriting a surplus from the Clinton years and turning it into almost a trillion a year in debt. When I told her that in fact the annual deficit – while still over a trillion has been shrinking since we experienced the first – and hopefully last bottoming-out from the “Great Recession” in 2009, she all but called me an uninformed liar. I wish I had this chart with me at that moment, but how often does fortune smile upon someone in such a fashion?
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After I made these points she denied being either a Democrat or a Republican but said rather she was a “proud conservative” with strong “conservative principles.” This got me thinking and brings me to the second thing she said which left me wondering if the doors to the restaurant actually opened into some sort of alternate universe; a universe in which someone could actually say “conservative” and “principles” in the same sentence and not have it be taken as an Oxymoron.
She said that’s why she stood by our local Congressman, Scott Garrett because he too was standing up for “conservative principles.” I questioned her on some of those principles but again she was not interested in listening to anyone who didn’t agree with her.
I’m sure there are conservatives whose principles transcend time and circumstances, but Scott Garrett does not fall into such a classification. Is it principled for Republicans to support stimulus funding as necessary during the three previous recessions in 1981, 1990, and 2001, but fail to do so now? Due to stimulus spending during these previous recessions, public sector jobs grew by 1% in 2001, 3% in 1990, and 3% in 1981. In the current recession, Republicans are obstructing stimulus spending and instead enacting austerity measures. The result is that the public sector has lost over 1 million jobs (over a full percentage point in the unemployment rate).
During these previous hard economic times Republicans understood that when neither consumers nor businesses are willing to fuel the economy then it’s the government that must act as our last line of defense. It’s the government that must spend in order to prevent a recession from turning into a depression. The difference to Republicans appears to be that in the previous recessions we had Republican presidents and now there’s a Democrat in the White House.
Scott Garrett was not a Member of Congress during those recessions, but he was there to vote for unfunded wars, unpaid high-end tax breaks and several other measures which now act as an anchor dragging down any economic recovery. After helping to break the bank, he voted against raising the debt ceiling and as a result The United States experienced our first-ever credit down-grade. These are not the acts of a “principled conservative.”
Are Scott Garrett and his fellow Republicans unaware that it’s better for a school teacher, police officer or fire fighter to earn and spend $50,000 annually than it is to have these same individuals – at best collecting unemployment benefits and at worse living on the streets? Apparently in the minds of Republican politicians, this concept only applies when one of their own is residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So much for “conservative principles.”
Filed under: Economy, Financial Crisis, Hypocrisy Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
