No, Greg, It’s That The Entire Republican Party has Decided to Lie
The only reasonable conclusion is that Greg Sargent should resign from the Washington Post before it finishes destroying his brain.
Give Sargent credit: he knows Mitt Romney is lying, and he calls him out on it, which—especially for the denizens of “Fox on 15th”—is as close to truth as you get outside of Sarah Kliff’s Wonkblog pieces.* But he always tries to find the bright side, assuming that it’s not deliberating lying so much as hoping there is a “memory hole” in the electorate.
RNC Chair Reince Preibus this evening went out of his way to prove that this is a far too generous. In an email entitled “Stop Obama’s Debt and Deficits,” he declares:
Obama’s [sic] racked up the three highest deficits in history and is scheduled to rack up the fourth this year.
In less than four years, President Obama has run up more than $5 trillion in debt, which is the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. President.
That is elephant shit.**
As I noted a couple of days ago, the “three highest deficits in history” (on an absolutely dollar basis, of course; no Republican currently in the party would admit that the largest percentage increase was under Ronald Wilson Reagan) include the fiscal year ending in September of 2009—the result of the Previous Administration’s final budget (which still holds the record in dollars, let alone inflation-adjusted terms, by at least $113B). That’s not just hoping for a “memory hole,” it’s outright prevarication. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.
Even if we were stupid enough to believe that Barack Obama was responsible for the Previous Administration’s final budget—what, he did a Vulcan Mind Meld, simultaneously planting the idea that Starburst Palin should be the Veep pick?—the total for those three years of deficit is just over $4T. So where does the RNC get $5T, just under 25% higher?
Well, again, we here in Dataland cannot answer that question. We can accurately state that Willard “My Name is Julie Mitt” Romney has been saying for a while that the jobs lost for the January, 2009, report—the report of data taken the week of the 12th, before the inauguration, but apparently journalists are even stupider than economists, since even Sargent let that blatant falsehood slide recently—are all Obama’s fault.***
So let’s be Amazingly Generous. Let’s accept, just for argument’s sake, that the deficit for the month of January, 2009—a month in which the Previous Administration was in office more than 5/8ths of the time—should all be blamed on the Obama Administration, even though they have no control of the purse strings.
In short, let’s make the scenario as bad as possible for the Obama Administration, while remaining in Dataland. If we were pretending that Reince Preibus was an Andrew Sarris stand-in, my next line would be, “Well, I have the Monthly Treasury Statement right here…”
For the time period from January, 2009 to April, 2012, inclusive, the total deficit is just under $4.4T.**** Yet Reince Preibus emails us that “President Obama has run up more than $5 trillion in debt.”
With the exception of Megan McArdle, no one who isn’t deliberately lying could be that innumerate, not even an English Lit/PoliSci J.D. with a staff and a budget.
If he really is that innumerate, then I have only one thing to say: Reince, buddy, it took me less than five minutes to document that your email was bollocks. You need to hire me (or someone like me). Today.
Otherwise, even Greg Sargent will have to admit that Mitt Romney isn’t just lying; he’s Following Orders to Lie.
*For which, far too often, Ezra Klein will be credited.
**I considered “horse” or “bull,” but the magnitude is at least in the “what, and quit show business” range.
***That the Party that claims that the 2001 recession—which began in March—was not their Administration’s fault has a standard bearer who declares that the layoffs the month before the following Administration took office are also Not Their Fault would win the Chutzpah Award if there were still journalism being practiced by another other than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
****By the way, Februarys have been especially ugly since 2002. If I any econometrician wants to look for when the Seasonal Adjustment formula went wrong, that might be a good place to start.
Debt to the penny reports total public debt at:
12/31/2008 10,699,804,864,612.13
05/15/2012 15,716,115,612,805.06
That’s $5T. ~$150B of it is the cute expediency of the 2% FICA cut being “paid for” by Congress directing the treasury to print the bonds for the SSTF to hold.
Ken,
Of course, Obama isn’t “to blame” for reductions in employment that took place before he took office. But in fairness, he contributed to them. Between the time he was elected and the time he took office, Mr. Obama spent a lot of time assuring us he would continue the same policies that the Bush administration had been using to unsuccessfully deal with the mess it had allowed to metastasize. The situation called for something that looked more like FDR’s First 100 Days, not more of the same. And promising more of the same didn’t help confidence at all.
Ken,
Did you miss the point that the Dems controlled the House and Senate during the last two years of Bush’s term?
Did you miss that Obama was in favor and voted for this budget as a Senater?
Did you miss that Obama supported the bailouts and other actions taken during the fall-winter 2008-2009 prior to his inauguration?
Did you miss that Obama did not reverse 1 action taken during the crises and (as Mike points out) assurred us he would continue these same policies – which he did?
Did you miss that, since Obama took office, the Dem controlled Senate has yet to pass a budget nor has any of Obama’s budgets get even 1 vote for it in the Senate – even by the Dems in the Senate?
Ken – your coming unglued here. Obama has failed at every level by the lefts own scorecard.
Islam will change
buffpilot, did you miss where the GOP has filibustered every attempt to introduce a budget? One person can totally block any bill, even a budget. When the only goal of a party is to destroy the President – even taking the country down with him – then they will do it just for the talking point.
… and “Buff Pilot” – ego much?
Of course budgets have been passed. The government cannot operate without a budget. Remember the threatened government shutdown? Here are references to the passage of the budgets while Obama has been in office.
The 2010 Budget
the 2011 Budget
The 2012 Budget
“confidence” is BS. The status quo pipe dream of 2002-2007 was falling apart in 2008, and we really don’t have anything to replace it other than this $5T debt bubble, $4.4T since May 15, 2009.
That’s just about $1000/mo/worker of fiscal stimulus for 3 long years.
The only way to get back the economy of 2005-2006 would be to reopen the floodgates of free money the middle quintiles were getting from the home ATM — around $1T/yr of debt take-on during this peak bubble time.
I don’t think we can go back there. Of course the Republicans are largely responsible for actively committing the policy errors that got us into this mess, and they have no answers to get us all out, and slagging on Obama for not actively working in his first term in the Senate or his first term as President to fix all our problems is unrealistic and unfair.
People who don’t understand the problem really don’t have anything intelligent to say about the solution.
Bobby,
The Senate voted down Obama’s budget, not filibustered it, 99-0. Not 1 Dem Senater voted for it.
Get your facts right and come back…
Islam will change
More specifically from the Washington Times:
President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.
Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.
Republicans forced the vote by offering the president’s plan on the Senate floor.
Democrats disputed that it was actually the president’s plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn’t actually match Mr. Obama’s budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president’s numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, even challenged Democrats to point out any errors in the numbers and he would correct them — a challenge no Democrats took up.
“A stunning development for the president of the United States in his fourth year in office,” Mr. Sessions said of the unanimous opposition.
Oh and budgets are immune to filibuster: More:
Sunday, April 29, 2012, is an anniversary unprecedented in the history of American politics, marking three years since the Democratic-led Senate last complied with federal law by passing a budget.
The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 stipulates that Congress must approve a budget resolution by April 15 of each year. In the Senate, only 51 votes are needed to pass a budget, as budgets are one of the few pieces of legislation invulnerable to a filibuster. Democrats currently control 53 seats.
And there is this fact:
It would mark the second year in a row that Senate Democrats have unanimously opposed the White House budget proposal.
Now tell me how the Obama is doing again?
Islam will change
Troy,
I made a reference to FDR’s First 100 Days. The goal there wasn’t to return to 1927, it was to stabilize an economy in freefall. Confidence matters.
I had a few posts between election day and innauguration day talking about how the bailouts, as structured, were only going to enrich undeserving characters and it was time to jettison the whol mess, and I’m not the only one who knew what the result would be, in broad terms. That isn’t good for confidence.
This is a nonsense argument.
The Republicans are supporting their base of capitalistss, entrepreneurs, business people, small business owners, social conservatives, and religious conservatives. They spend money on foreign policy in order to stabilize and secure the price of oil from risk. Regan fought to restore entrepreneurialism and defeat world communism. The Bush’s to restrain it’s new face in readical islam.
The Democrats are supporting their base, which is a diverse alliance of non-marktet actors, and competitors to the conservative social program.
As Schumpeter argued, the competition for power between the public intellectuals biased toward female voters and teh entrepreneurs biased toward male voters would continue to polarize the body politic. And that totalitarianism or dissolutoin would result. He didn not account for the added dimension of racial polarization.
To argue that political speech exists wthin a framework where we seek compromise through honest discourse rthart than seek to inhibit the ambitions of the oppositon parties is in itself either foolish or an attempt at deception.
Politics is coercion. Small homogenous egalitarian states conduct fairly straighforward debates. But whether a small state like belgium, a federation of discordant states like europe, or an empire of geograpical extent like the united states, fractured by culture and race, a democratic government cannot resolve conflicts through honest debate since we are not arguing for selection among priorities, but arguing for mutually exclusive ends.
There is no ‘We’.
This is a nonsense argument.
The Republicans are supporting their base of capitalistss, entrepreneurs, business people, small business owners, social conservatives, and religious conservatives. They spend money on foreign policy in order to stabilize and secure the price of oil from risk. Regan fought to restore entrepreneurialism and defeat world communism. The Bush’s to restrain it’s new face in readical islam.
The Democrats are supporting their base, which is a diverse alliance of non-marktet actors, and competitors to the conservative social program.
As Schumpeter argued, the competition for power between the public intellectuals biased toward female voters and teh entrepreneurs biased toward male voters would continue to polarize the body politic. And that totalitarianism or dissolutoin would result. He didn not account for the added dimension of racial polarization.
To argue that political speech exists wthin a framework where we seek compromise through honest discourse rthart than seek to inhibit the ambitions of the oppositon parties is in itself either foolish or an attempt at deception.
Politics is coercion. Small homogenous egalitarian states conduct fairly straighforward debates. But whether a small state like belgium, a federation of discordant states like europe, or an empire of geograpical extent like the united states, fractured by culture and race, a democratic government cannot resolve conflicts through honest debate since we are not arguing for selection among priorities, but arguing for mutually exclusive ends.
There is no ‘We’.
This is a nonsense argument.
The Republicans are supporting their base of capitalistss, entrepreneurs, business people, small business owners, social conservatives, and religious conservatives. They spend money on foreign policy in order to stabilize and secure the price of oil from risk. Regan fought to restore entrepreneurialism and defeat world communism. The Bush’s to restrain it’s new face in readical islam.
The Democrats are supporting their base, which is a diverse alliance of non-marktet actors, and competitors to the conservative social program.
As Schumpeter argued, the competition for power between the public intellectuals biased toward female voters and teh entrepreneurs biased toward male voters would continue to polarize the body politic. And that totalitarianism or dissolutoin would result. He didn not account for the added dimension of racial polarization.
To argue that political speech exists wthin a framework where we seek compromise through honest discourse rthart than seek to inhibit the ambitions of the oppositon parties is in itself either foolish or an attempt at deception.
Politics is coercion. Small homogenous egalitarian states conduct fairly straighforward debates. But whether a small state like belgium, a federation of discordant states like europe, or an empire of geograpical extent like the united states, fractured by culture and race, a democratic government cannot resolve conflicts through honest debate since we are not arguing for selection among priorities, but arguing for mutually exclusive ends.
There is no ‘We’.
(Triple post. Something is wrong with the plugin confirming a post.)
“As Schumpeter argued, the competition for power between the public intellectuals biased toward female voters and teh entrepreneurs biased toward male voters would continue to polarize the body politic. And that totalitarianism or dissolutoin would result. He didn not account for the added dimension of racial polarization.” Curt Doolittle
Prey tell. What is a public intellectual. What evidence is there that such a group in some way is biased towards female voters? What is the evidence that entrepreneurs are biased toward male voters, or any group of males? Curt, if you’re going to use up pixels and band width please be less inane. Make a little bit of sense, please.
Curt, again: “Regan fought to restore entrepreneurialism and defeat world communism.”
Where was the restoration shown to have taken place? World communism?? What’s that? What was that? Curt, are you the ghost of Joe McCarthy? Actually Nixon did an excellent job of introducing entrepreneurship to the leadership of the Chinese communist economy. Now they have all the marbels. One way to destroy world communism is to explain to the leaders of that group that they can defeat capitalism by simply stealing all the manufacturing work to be done through the exploitation of an already desperately poor population. So glad to have given what was Americas (a manufacturiing base on which to run an economy) for the sake of the Chinese peasant class and their over lords, those lucky enough to be members of the party.
And lastly: “….a democratic government cannot resolve conflicts through honest debate since we are not arguing for selection among priorities, but arguing for mutually exclusive ends.”
Are you leaving out whatever it was that we had here throughout most of the 20th Century. What you’re failing to recognize is the phenomenon of great wealth making increasingly more aggressive efforts to secure all the wealth for themselves and to take complete control of government activities as a means of achieving that goal. Sadly it’s the ignorance of the masses that is helping the right wing reactionaries iin their efforts to achievel their goals.