The former Speaker of the House speaks lies,
Speaker Pelosi Leaves With a Whopper
At her final press conference as House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said, “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”
The numbers tell a different story.
When the Pelosi Democrats took control of Congress on January 4, 2007, the national debt stood at $8,670,596,242,973.04. The last day of the 111th Congress and Pelosi’s Speakership on December 22, 2010 the national debt was $13,858,529,371,601.09 – a roughly $5.2 trillion increase in just four years. Furthermore, the year over year federal deficit has roughly quadrupled during Pelosi’s four years as speaker, from $342 billion in fiscal year 2007 to an estimated $1.6 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2010.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are backtracking: Republicans Lower Goal for Cuts to Budget,
because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law
Patterico asks, Do We Need a Third Party?
I’m starting to think we do. Because I don’t think the Republicans have the slightest idea what we’re all so pissed off about.
As evidence, let me cite a recent Allahpundit post about the GOP’s dithering about whether they can cut a whole fucking $100 billion from the budget:
Their excuse will be that the fiscal year, which began on October 1, will already be almost half over by the time the budgetary resolution that was passed during the lame duck runs out in March. That means they’ll only have seven months to work with this fiscal year; when they said they’d cut $100 billion, they meant the first full fiscal year that they’re in charge. But wait, you say! Shouldn’t it be fairly easy to find $100 billion to cut in an annual budget that exceeds $3.5 trillion? Well, yes — except that the GOP’s limiting itself to cutting discretionary spending (Social Security and Medicare are, as ever, completely off-limits) and even within discretionary spending they refuse to touch “security” budgets, i.e. Defense and Homeland Security. That leaves just $500 billion or so for this year to play with, and since, as Rich Lowry noted earlier at the Corner, a good chunk of that will already have been spent by the time the continuing resolution expires in the spring, they’d have to make huge cuts to what’s left in order to get to $100 billion in savings overall.
The point to ponder here, I think, is that even the highly touted $100 billion figure is just a small fraction of last year’s deficit. Even with a tea-party Congress, even with a gigantic pool of expenditures to cut from, political reality is such that not only can’t they reach that modest, largely symbolic target in seven months, they’ll actually have to move heaven and earth during the next full fiscal year to get Obama and the Senate Democrats to agree to it. This is what we’ve been reduced to — the suspense of wondering whether the new Republican majority can achieve cuts that will barely make a dent in our annual budget shortfall. Hugely depressing.
“Depressing” doesn’t begin to cover it. There really aren’t words for how absolutely infuriating this is. More and more, the temptation to leave the keyboard one is calmly typing on, and simply pound the fucking wall in frustration and dream of an armed insurrection . . . becomes something understandable rather than something we all know we should calmly denounce.
Say what you will about President Bush — whose memoir I am about 2/3 of the way through and enjoying immensely — but at least he tried to do something about Social Security. This ridiculous notion that everything that actually contributes to spending must be considered off the table — well, we have to take that notion off the table. We have to. No matter what it takes. We have to do it.
Patterico asks,
What does it take to wake these people up? Honestly?!
Does it take a third party?
It may take a third party. However, government spending, in most people’s minds, is an abstraction.
But before there is a viable third party, here’s a fact: More than half of income earners in the US do not pay federal income taxes. This means that a lot of people do not have their earnings directly decreased and seized by the government the way the earnings of the tax-paying minority are. Abstractions like federal deficits don’t hit you in the gut directly; having half (or more) of your yearly earnings taken away does. Until and unless each and every wage earner is taxed, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is going to change.
