Republicans Claim Fiscal Responsibility - That's NOT TRUE!

From Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times: 

With a Democrat inhabiting the White House, perhaps the most predictable thing about House Republicans’ return to power is this: They’ve rediscovered their faux fiscal conservatism.

All week members of the Republican majority have been chest-beating about how, thanks to the new House rules they devised, they will restore rectitude to federal budgeting. Income will be balanced against spending and debt reduced, just as American families have to do at their kitchen tables.

Don’t take that promise to the bank. It’ll bounce. And not because Republicans are up against the supposedly profligate Democrats who control the White House and Senate. As we begin what’s sure to be a chaotic two years of Republican governance in the House, a little fiscal history is in order, no green eyeshades needed.

In short, Republicans forfeited the title “fiscal conservatives” so long ago, most Americans weren’t even born yet

A fiscal conservative advocates for small government and low taxes but is open to higher taxes if necessary to erase deficits. That kind of thinking defined the Republican Party for most of the 20th century.

Starting with the Reagan era, however, the party flipped its orthodoxy on its head: Republicans became so anti-tax that each time their party took power, they willfully drove up deficits in the higher cause of slashing taxes for businesses and the rich. And each time, Republicans’ claims that the tax cuts would pay for themselves (economic growth!) were disproved by the record — Reagan’s, George W. Bush’s and Donald Trump’s.

Yet to hear House Republicans lately, you’d think Democrats and a few RINOs were responsible for the entire $31-trillion gross federal debt. Heck, we’re still paying on debt from Bush’s administration, when, for six of his eight years, Republicans also controlled Congress. Republicans’ red ink, which quickly washed away a budget surplus Bush had inherited, flowed largely from tax cuts, an unnecessary war in Iraq and a big, unfunded domestic program, Medicare Part D, to cover seniors’ prescription drugs.

Democrats for years had wanted to add a drug benefit for older Americans, but were stymied by the cost; in 1990, they’d agreed with the first President Bush (a fiscal conservative, mostly) that new tax cuts or spending on entitlement programs like Medicare would be paid for with separate spending cuts or tax increases. The second Bush and his Republican allies simply got rid of the rule, so they could cut taxes and enact Part D, deficits be damned. (As Vice President Dick Cheney famously said, deficits didn’t matter anymore.)

Democrats, in true fiscally conservative fashion, revived the “pay as you go” rule when they regained power in Congress. President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was mostly paid for with spending cuts and new taxes on businesses that stood to benefit from additional paying patients. When Trump was elected and Republicans took charge again, those taxes were repealed, adding some Obamacare debt to the nation’s tab and once again rendering Republican claims to fiscal rectitude hollow.

That move was responsible for just a fraction of the debt we’re now shouldering from Trump’s tenure. Lest the former president’s defenders rush to argue that he was blindsided by a costly pandemic, know this: Before COVID-19 struck, Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress had piled up nearly $5 trillion in debt, projected over a decade, from both higher spending and tax cuts. That’s according to the (truly) fiscally conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Trump left behind almost $8 trillion in total debt after four years, more than either the second Bush or Obama did in each man’s eight years as president, as the conservative Manhattan Institute found.

Did the purported deficit-hawk Republicans now running the House complain? Of course not. On that, like any other outrage of the Trump years, they were silent. And complicit.

But they’ve found their voices now that Joe Biden is president, although their tough talk goes only so far: Tax cuts don’t have to be paid for under the new Republican rules, which require that only of some new spending.

Three times during Trump’s term, Republicans quietly went along in raising the federal debt limit, so that the government could keep borrowing to cover costs that they, along with past presidents and Congresses, had run up on the nation’s credit card. No drama, no conditions. Yet even before House Republicans won power in the midterm elections, they were promising to hold the debt limit hostage unless Biden and Democrats would agree to huge spending cuts.

“We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?” then-minority leader and now Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in October.

“Your” credit card, says the man who’s been a member of Congress for 16 years, and in the House Republican leadership for 14. Over time, he voted for countless unfunded tax cuts and more spending than he’d admit to.

Raising the debt limit doesn’t add a cent to deficits and debt; it merely ensures that the government can pay existing bills. But refusing to raise it could be catastrophic, for the nation and for a global economy that relies on the United States for a stable dollar. When House Republicans seriously flirted with blocking a debt ceiling increase in 2011, under Obama, the threat rocked markets.

To play this game again would be the most fiscally irresponsible and least fiscally conservative thing that Republicans could do. But as history warns us, don’t put it past them. They’re fiscal fakers.

You Not Being Vaccinated IS Our Business!

Those on the right would like for us to believe that being vaccinated or wearing a mask is a personal choice, and by refusing to do either they are just exercising their person freedom. They even go so far as to say it is none of our business whether they are vaccinated or wear a mask in a crowd. They are wrong!

A person choosing to not wear a mask or not be vaccinated is putting other people in danger and making the pandemic last longer than it should. And that is our business. You don't have the right to endanger the public health anymore than you have a right to drive drunk or yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Rights have some limits, especially when it comes to endangering others.

Here is some of what Jamelle Bouie had to say about it in The New York Times:

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly (albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use authorization.”

Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned. Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action.

From the jump, the federal government devolved its response to the pandemic, foisting responsibility onto states and localities, which, in turn, left individual Americans and their communities to navigate conflicting rules and information.

This approach continued with the arrival of vaccines. Until recently, in the face of a vaccination plateau, there was not even a mandate for federal employees to be vaccinated. States and employers have been left to their own devices, and individuals face a patchwork of rules and mandates, depending on where they live and where they work.

Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people to prevent the spread of a deadly disease — as a personal one? Or that many people have refused to get a shot, citing the privacy of their decision as well as their freedom to do as they choose?

Consider, too, the larger cultural and political context of the United States. We still live in the shadow of the Reagan revolution and its successful attack on America’s traditions of republican solidarity and social responsibility. “Over the past 50 years,” Mike Konczal writes in “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself From the Grip of the Invisible Hand,” “both our personal lives and our economy have been forced ever more deeply into market dependency.”

This extends into our political lives — and our political selves — as well. If American society has been reshaped in the image of capital, then Americans themselves have been pushed to relate to one another and our institutions as market creatures in search of utility, as opposed to citizens bound together by rights and obligations. . . .

Not because they are lazy, of course, but because this is the society we have built, where individuals are left to carry the burdens of life into the market and hope that they survive. This so-called freedom is ill suited to human flourishing. It is practically maladaptive in the face of a pandemic.

That’s why families and communities were left to fend for themselves in the face of disease, why so many people treat the question of exposure and contagion as a personal choice made privately and why our institutions have made vaccination a choice when it should have been mandated from the start. . . .

When you structure a society so that every person must be an island, you cannot then blame people when inevitably they act as if they are. If we want a country that takes solidarity seriously, we will actually have to build one.

The Virus Is Surging In Texas, And Gov. Abbott Is The Reason

One of the bigger lies that Donald Trump told was that the Coronavirus would die out once the hot weather of summer arrived. It didn't.

The virus got worse last summer, and in many states, that is happening again -- especially in red states.

One of the states where the virus is surging again is Texas. It's happening because Gov. Abbott played politics with the virus instead of putting public safety first.

Now he is taking another page from the Trump playbook. He is blaming immigrants for the surge.

That is ridiculous. If Abbott wanted to see the person most responsible for the surge, all he has to do is look in the mirror.

Here is what Steve Vladeck has to say about it at MSNBC.com:

On Wednesday, Texas reported more than 10,000 new Covid-19 cases — the highest one-day total for the nation’s second-largest state since Feb. 9. On the same day, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new executive order that, he claimed, would help counter the surge. 

Abbott’s order restricts the “ground transportation of migrants who pose a risk of carrying COVID-19 into Texas communities” by authorizing Texas law enforcement officers to “stop any vehicle upon reasonable suspicion” of violating the executive order.

The accompanying news release did not leave the link between the two issues to readers’ imaginations: “The dramatic rise in unlawful border crossings has also led to a dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases among unlawful migrants who have made their way into our state,” Abbott was quoted as saying, “and we must do more to protect Texans from this virus and reduce the burden on our communities.”

Abbott’s executive order is, at least publicly, meant to tie Texas’s Covid surge to the Biden administration’s immigration policies. In a second release issued Thursday, Abbott was even more direct: “The current crisis at our southern border, including the overcrowding of immigration facilities and the devastating spread of COVID-19 that the influx of non-citizens is causing, is entirely the creation of the Biden Administration and its failed immigration policies.”

There are at least three problems here. First, the actual executive order that he signed doesn’t do anything like what the news release claims it does. Second, what little it does do would, if ever enforced, be equal parts unlawful and ineffective. Third, and most significantly, it’s a transparently cynical effort from Abbott to deflect attention away from his responsibility for the renewed surge of Covid cases in Texas — a state in which local governments, public schools and universities are all prohibited from imposing mask mandates or, as of Thursday, requiring vaccinations.

Simply put, if Abbott is looking for someone to blame for Texas’s latest Covid surge, it might behoove him to find a mirror.

The executive order that Abbott actually signed does not, in fact, authorize all Texas law enforcement officers to stop any individual suspected of being an undocumented immigrant carrying Covid-19 anywhere in the state. Rather, the order is directed solely at the transportation of undocumented immigrants from federal immigration facilities to shelters, hospitals and other places where they can be safely housed while their fate is determined. (That includes being moved for Covid testing.)

Indeed, the order does not prevent federal law enforcement officers themselves from moving these people from immigration facilities to other locations; it merely prevents other federal actors, or private parties, including those operating under government contracts, from doing so.

That’s a big deal for charities and other nongovernmental organizations currently assisting the Biden administration along the Texas-Mexico border. But contra the clear insinuation of Abbott’s news release, it’s not open season for racial profiling on Texas roadways.

Public Sees Government Responsibility In Several Areas

 

These charts are from the Pew Research Center. It shows there are several areas in which a majority of the public believes government has a responsibility. The results are from a survey they did between April 5th and 11th of a national sample of 5,109 adults, with a 2.1 point margin of error.