Craving Sense
Posted: August 29, 2010 by Russ Buchanan in Republican Election Strategy, Republican Lies, Republicans
Tags: "Weather Vane" McCain, Alan Greenspan, Boehner, Buchania, Bush Tax Cuts, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, David Stockman, deficit, George Bush, John McCain, Joint Committee on Taxation, N. Gregory Mankiw, Obama, Republican lies, Republicans, voodoo economics 
This is the first of ten installments examining the biggest and fattest, most unapologetic out-and-out whoppers that Republicans will be running on this November. It was hard to narrow the list down to just ten (I could have done volumes on Michele Bachmann alone), but after extensive study and fact checking, these are the winners of “The Ten Biggest Republican Lies.”
#1. Extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Will Reduce the Deficit
To grow the economy, I, King Russell of Buchania, have decided to extend a 5% tax reduction to my subjects. For most of my subjects the 5% reduction will merely postpone the wolf’s scratching at the door, but for my fellow aristocrats the cuts will result in a doubloon windfall—a cascade of cash that they will then invest in Buchania businesses and the creation of jobs for my many unemployed subjects.
I will then be able to collect enough taxes from my happy, gainfully employed people that I will be able to replace the amount Buchania’s treasury lost by cutting taxes in the first place. The Deficit of the Realm will be reduced, and I, their beloved sovereign, will then be able to pay for better roads and better education for their children.
The deficit reduction caused by my tax cuts will also calm the fears of our creditor kingdoms, Chinathia and Germandria, whose growing nervousness about our out-of-control spending might have led them to dump—for pennies on the doubloon—the trillion in Buchania Treasury Notes they now hold… a situation so devastating we would long for the relatively good old days of the Black Plague.
Dark Days in Buchania
Later, when Buchania’s unemployment reaches 20%, and my subjects have discovered that my tax cuts only fattened the deficit and the bank accounts of my fellow aristocrats, their love for me will diminish. When the rabble further discover that instead of investing in Buchania’s economy, my wealthy chums used their tax cuts to purchase fine country estates and caviar for their polo ponies. This will not sit well with the Great Unwashed. After losing their livestock, thatched huts and sanity, they will storm my castle and hang me from the outstretched arm of my beautiful, new, jewel-encrusted, 50-foot-tall statue of Adam Smith.
The Voodoo They Do
“Voodoo Economics” is what Bush Sr. called this particular piece of “supply-side” theory eventually signed into law by his Voodoo-friendly son. Before Senator John McCain became “Weather Vane” McCain, he too loudly inveighed against this obviously unworkable scheme.
N. Gregory Mankiw, former chair of Bush Jr.’s Council of Economic Advisers, broke it down like this: The money kept in the private sector by cuts in capital gains taxes generate only about half of the government revenue lost by the cuts, while payroll tax cuts replace about 17% of what the government would have collected without the cuts.
Continuing across-the-board tax-slashing while our deficit turns into a fiscal version of “The Blob” is economic madness; only a fraction of the money kept in the private sector due to tax cuts finds its way back into government coffers.
Economists with impeccable conservative bona fides, including Alan Greenspan and Reagan budget chief David Stockman, predict fiscal disaster if the Bush tax cuts don’t expire when they’re supposed to at midnight, December 31, 2010.
Bush’s Folly in Perpetuity and the “Small Business” Canard
If Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to continue, the wealthiest Americans–by far the major beneficiaries of the cuts–would simply pile those millions on top of the money they’re already hoarding. The only jobs created: crews for their new yachts.
Small business owners–the folks Republicans claim are in Obama’s “over $250,000 ” bracket — AREN’T. John McCain can shout, “23 million small-business owners will see their taxes go up under Obama’s scheme” all he wants, but he can’t make it true. In fact, a number of those business owners will see their taxes go down.
According to FactCheck.com’s analysis, “McCain is counting mostly ‘business owners’ with no workers, including those who simply report small amounts of income from sideline or freelance work. McCain is arguing that Obama’s tax increase would “destroy jobs,” but he’s counting mostly firms that don’t produce any.”
Business Week tells us that “8.9% of individuals who report small business income or loss (including self-employment income; income from S-corps, partnerships, and limited liability companies; farm income; and income from rental property and royalties), have household income greater than $250,000. But fewer than 2% of those filers fall into the top two tax brackets.” From Business Week, no less–not exactly a bastion of wealth redistribution.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, extending Bush’s tax cuts would add $2.6 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
We’d have to really hate our kids and grandkids to leave them holding that kind of bag.
When you add to the Bush tax cuts our current policy of continual war, our red ink begins to take on biblical proportion– plague, locusts and the American deficit. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficit from 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the [unpaid for] Medicare drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.”
Republican Whoppers
We’ve gotten used to Republican end-runs around the truth with “death panels,” global warming-as-hoax, Iraq’s WMDs, etc., but those claims at least offered some sort of plausible deniability, i.e., “Everybody thought Saddam had WMDs,” or “Obamacare does mention ‘panels’ and ‘death’ at different points in the legislation.” But, the bold assertion that tax cuts will reduce the deficit is not only the biggest and fattest of big fat Republican lies, it leaves no credible dance steps toward the wings for its minstrels.
Once Americans see the original Bush tax cuts and their extension as tragic fiscal policy, Boehner and crew could try, “You heard us wrong; We said, ‘Let’s end, not extend,’ ” but somehow I don’t think anybody will buy it…or prevent us rabble from carrying our pitchforks and torches to the voting booth.
Next installment of “The Ten Biggest Republican Lies” – #2. “We are the Party of Family Values”
Ten Biggest Republican Lies #2: The Party of “Family Values”
Posted: September 7, 2010 by Russ Buchanan in Republican Election Strategy, Republican Lies, Banking Reform, Consumer Rights
Tags: public option, Health Care Reform, Supreme Court, Tea Party, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, corporatocracy, Gay Rights, same-sex marriage, deregulation, Republicans, marijuana legalization, Republican, bigotry, Republican lies, top ten Republican lies, Kucinich, Grayson, November election, political party choice, assault weapon ban, unions, anti-union, union-busting, Upper Big Branch coalmine, family values, Larry Craigs, David Vitters, homeless children, socialist, lazy Americans, America 50s, 50's in america, 50's american family, consumer protection, job-killing regulation, jobs, regulations on industry, republicans and the constitution 
Actually, there is no pat meaning or definition for the phrase “family values.” Like obscenity, I guess, you just know it when you see it. Often used by social conservatives to conjure up a mythical America of yesteryear, the phrase evokes an era when everyone’s lawn was green, thick and well manicured, kids were obedient, and “Lassie” had no genitalia—long before liberals turned us into gay, pot-smoking abortionists, before minorities and women got so noisy and before movie stars said naughty words on screen.
Today many Republicans use the term as a weapon against same-sex marriage, legal abortion, the decriminalization of marijuana and a zillion other issues they find unacceptable.
To clarify our terms, I suggest we define “family values” as “valuing the American family.” “Republicans” will mean, “the movers and shakers of today’s dynamic GOP.”
Valuing the Family… the Republican Way
To be fair, I think Republicans do value families… but only their own. Everybody else’s family is either trying to stay in the country illegally, getting rich and lazy on welfare, undeserving of a living wage, a terrorist cell, or immorally trying to become a family while being gay.
Though many Democratic leaders share the blame in the Great Stacking of the Deck Against American Families, these Democrats tend to be of the sneaky, corporate shill variety who are often at odds with American families’ wishes and their own party’s positions (see Public Option). Republicans, however, are very open about their willingness to throw the American family under the bus in the name of big business, bigotry, big business, bad judgment and big business.
There is really no reason—or enough room on my hard drive—to go into all of the sordid, headline-grabbing family values hypocrisies of Republicans like Sen. David “Escort Service” Vitter and Sen. Larry “Strokin’ in the Boys Room” Craigs. Though these indiscretions do highlight the dilemma of a party that professes to love America but can’t tolerate American lifestyles, they are not the result of official Party policy, as far as I know. Rather, it’s the official, loudly-touted policies of today’s lockstep GOP leadership that amply demonstrate the party’s disregard for the vast majority of American families.
With the possible exception of a proposed Wendell Willkie postage stamp, every major item on the GOP wish list would either be disadvantageous to most American families or devastating if put into effect.
Here are a few:
Deregulation
As homeless shelters burst at the seams with newly impoverished families, and old folks wonder how on earth they’re going to get through their golden years now that their 401 Ks are in tatters and their homes are worth borscht, Republicans are clamoring to let the Wall Street Greedmasters who drove our economy into a ditch continue to speed along with even fewer rules of the road.
Rather than offering to commit public seppuku for creating the Reagan-Gramm deregulation free-for-all that made the banking greed orgy possible, Republican enablers like Sen. Mitch McConnell and others call Obama a socialist for wanting more governmental oversight of the industry, whining in chorus that such intrusion into the private sector would kill jobs and stifle innovation.
Yeah, we saw the kind of “innovation” Wall Street is capable of.
And by the way, whenever you hear a sentence containing any form of the words “job” and “kill” spoken by a Republican, remember who was steering the ship of state when the jobs began to die. You’ve got to admire Republican testicular strength, though—if nothing else—for even mentioning “deregulation” and “jobs” in the same sentence.
Anti-Unionism
For the last thirty years Americans have been watching their wages decline while CEOs have increasingly taken home salaries and bonuses that would seem excessive to the Sultan of Brunei. According to a University of California Santa Cruz study, the top 20% of households owned 85% of all privately held wealth in 2007—leaving the rest of us 80% to divvy up the remaining 15%.
Where did America’s middle class go? It committed suicide in the voting booth.
Oddly enough, it was also during this time that Republican policies, votes and propaganda made it more difficult for workers to unionize. Organized labor has gone from representing one-third of America’s workforce in 1950 to just 12.4% in 2009 with half of those union members working in the easier-to-organize public sector.
But the union bashing continues. Why? As organizations of and for working Americans, unions tend to favor Democrats. Republicans know if they can get rid of unions completely, Democrats will lose the financial support and organizational strengths unions have historically given to Democratic politicians and issues. When the dust settles, Republicans will have the support of Big Business, and all the support corporate money can buy, while Democrats are left to beg for individual donations on the Internet. Incredibly, Republicans have managed to get a surprising number of American workers—low skilled through professional—to swallow this anti-union codswallop. Somehow the right has transformed the image of organized labor from Woody Guthrie rousing a room with his guitar into Vito Corleone spraying a room with a sub-machine gun.
Have we forgotten where living wages, worker safety, tolerable conditions and decent hours came from in the first place? Anybody who thinks these advances for American families were made possible by the goodness of corporate hearts should be made to write “British Petroleum” 100 times on the blackboard, or at the very least, read this little heart-warmer about two high-level Massey Energy executives and their descent into the Upper Big Branch coalmine immediately after the mine’s deadly explosion. Heroic rescue attempt or an attempt to rescue themselves from criminal indictments, and billions in fines and civil judgments against the company?
Anti-Same-Sex Marriage
By attempting to end these families before they’ve even begun, this Republican position affecting a large number of our countrymen and women may be the hands-down champ of blatant, Republican anti-family-ness. Good lord, fellas, I know this issue whips your Tea Party pals into a drooling troll dance, but sometimes, reason, fairness and the U.S. Constitution must win over political expedience…mustn’t it…sometimes?
I really don’t think anyone with the power to reason still believes that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, a naughty experiment or juicy flaunting of our moral code. No one really thinks that teenagers choose to be slammed into lockers by lettermen clubs, or look happily forward to the day they will tell their parents to “forget about grandchildren from me.”
So, what we have here is a major political party attempting to punish and marginalize a large segment of the American population by trying to prohibit them from doing what comes naturally —fall in love and get married. As gays and lesbians try to lead their lives despite cruel prejudice and religious dogma that holds approximately the same modern relevance as stoning your son to death for being a gluttonous drunkard (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), the Grand Old Party does its level best to keep anti-gay bigotry loud and alive by demanding prior restraint on would-be families with its Marriage Protection Amendment to the Constitution.
Lifting the Assault Weapon Ban
What can anyone say about this Republican wish and its potential effect on American families, other than “Lift the assault weapon ban?”
Come November
The Republican Party’s long tradition of siding with big business over the American family continues to chip away at the average American’s earning power and standard of living. However, the damage a Republican-controlled Washington could further inflict on American families isn’t limited to economics. When you toss in other family-unfriendly Republican positions on global warming, preemptive and continual war, education, reproductive rights and family planning, and their new jaw-dropper regarding unemployment insurance creating “lazy” Americans, it’s not too difficult to figure out which party’s policies and worldview are more pro-family.
The sad truth is, until special interest money is removed from our electoral system, neither party will truly be the champion of the American family. With the Republican majority of the Supreme Court opening the corporate spigots wide with its Citizens United ruling, that heavenly day is likely to be a long, long way down the line.
Forced to choose between the two parties, however, the American family would be wise to go with the party of politicians, like Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, politicos who have clearly demonstrated their support for American families with their clear-cut (and often lonely) positions on issues like healthcare reform, the environment and war.
The Grand Old Party is too darned busy selling American families to the highest corporate bidders, undermining the Obama presidency at the country’s expense, and coming up with new and better ways of converting Americans’ lesser angels of fear and bigotry into votes to even care about how American families are doing.
Unless your family is wealthy, heterosexual and bulletproof…I’d stick with the Democrats.
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