Well….before I get to the political stuff…I do have to relay one bit of trail weirdness…well…maybe not weirdness but coolness let’s say….there must have been a huge hatch of those little blue butterflies yesterday….there were hundreds of them on the trail and when I went through the swarms they looked just like blue snowflakes blowing in the wind…just the coolest thing…
Okay, now on to the stupidity….there is so much crying on the repub side about deficits that they want try to pass a constitutional amendment to limit the governments ability to respond to slowdowns by codifying the percentage of government spending to an average of the last thirty years….basically saying that they can see the future and know what is going to happen 10, 20, 30 years down the road. They didn’t even see the crash coming in 2008….how can they now believe they are prescient? Just another bunch of stupidity by the party of the know-nothings who are proud of their ignorance and who willfully confuse ideology with good policy and who choose ideology over the needs of the citizens of this country…geez….
Well…after reading all week of the deficits that plague both state and the federal government and the efforts to cut spending to match the depressed tax revenues caused by the recession, I find one part of the puzzle missing…the direct cause of most of the deficits. It’s one that the repubs don’t want to talk about anymore: the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. Of the 1.4 trillion dollar federal deficit, 1 trillion of that is caused by the extension of the tax cuts for the rich and if Obama and the dems had some guts, they would have said no to that compromise that put us on the path of “starve the beast” that the repubs have been preaching forever.
This little tidbit comes from a front page article in the GR Press the other day where the Lt gov here in Michigan defended the budget proposals that give tax cuts to corporations by raising taxes on the poor and retired by saying “forget the present”…and put your belief in some vague future where tax cuts are supposed to spur business; never mind that they never have…never in history. What the problem with these guys is that they are saying trust us, trust that we know what we are doing and our budget process is not driven by ideology and lies. Well…Mr. Calley…the one thing that we are learning here in Michigan and across the country is that the repubs can’t be trusted…their entire reason for being is to transfer wealth from the middle class to corporations and the rich and to shred what little is left of the social safety net. What I want to ask you and your cronies is: “How much is enough?” Companies in the US have the highest retained profits in history…and they are not creating any jobs. So you propose to throw more money at them and say “pretty please, create some jobs”…you know where that extra money is going to go…right into the bonuses of the ceo’s…and you want the poor and retired to pay them? Geez….
What you never want to be….