Republican Economics Ignores Reality

I honestly don't know how congressional Republicans can sleep at night or look at themselves in a mirror these days. The rich denizens of Wall Street and corporate America are doing doing well these days -- so well they can give themselves millions of dollars in bonuses. So what do the Republicans propose? Give these rich people even more money by extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.

At the same time, they are trying to block legislation to stimulate new jobs. They expose their hypocrisy by claiming the less than $2 billion needed to stimulate new jobs would be too big a burden on the country's deficit, while ignoring the effect extending the tax cuts for the rich would have on the deficit (which would be 488 times as large as the stimulus plan). For Republicans, helping their rich buddies (who don't need any help) is good, while helping ordinary Americans (who desperately need the help) is a bad thing.

The Republicans cling to the repeatedly disproven "trickle-down" economic policy -- which says if you just keep giving money to the rich they will eventually share it with the rest of America. No one believes this any more. After seeing the richest Americans get even richer for years while the rest of America gets poorer, the stupidity of this economic argument has become obvious to all but the brain-dead.

Meanwhile working and middle class Americans remain mired in a stubborn recession that now looks like it is going to take a second nosedive before we have even begun to recover from the first. Just how bad is this recession? Much worse that the economic pundits (or Republicans want to admit).

We are told that the economy is looking better because joblessness is under 10% (according to the fraudulent government figures). A much more realistic figure is the percentage the government calls underemployed. This figure represents both those who are unemployed and those who have had to accept a low-paying part-time job because because they can't find full-time work. This figure now stands at 18.4% according to a new Gallup Poll (which was conducted with a large enough number of respondents to make the margin of error only 1%), up 0.1% from a month ago.

And while the rates of unemployment and underemployment hover near record highs, there is another figure that shows just how bad things are getting in this country -- the number of people that have had to resort to using food stamps to feed their families (and don't let anyone try to fool you into believing these are just minority folks -- the majority are poor and working whites).

The government reported a couple of days ago that a record-setting 40.8 million people received food stamps in May (that's around 13.5% of the country's population). That marked the 18th month in a row that the number of people receiving food stamps has set a record. And things are not expected to get better any time soon. The government expects this figure to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.

If Republicans regain congressional power in November it will be even worse. That's because the only real economic policy they have is to replay the economic policies of George Bush -- the same policies that put us in this mess in the first place. They have to be completely devoid of shame, or they would never show their faces in public again.