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So, it’s time to put away the old refrain, “Democrats aren’t fiscally responsible, and the Republicans are.”  Here’s a graph that puts that lie to bed for good.

This graph demonstrates that when debt to GDP is compared between Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents that Republicans run up national debt, and Democrats are much more fiscally responsible. The largest increases in gross debt relative to GDP during the last 30 years occurred (in ascending order) under George H.W. Bush with +11.2%, followed by George W. Bush  at +11.9%, and then Ronald Reagan tops the charts at a whopping  +18.5%.

Democratic President Bill Clinton made some major headway in reducing all that Republican debt.  He actually left a surplus for George W. Bush, who could have used the surplus for debt reduction (or even rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure or building high-speed rail for our infrastructure for the future), but decided instead to give tax cuts which primarily benefited the wealthiest Americans.  George W. reversed the debt-reduction progress that Bill Clinton had achieved, and ended up leaving an even higher debt to GDP to the country than his father, Bush 41, did.  And what do we have to show for all these debt-producing tax cuts for the wealthy?  What we did not get was a thriving economy, what we got for all those tax cuts was a weak economy, debilitating debt, and a financial meltdown.

Obama has added to W.’s debt levels, due to the need to temporarily support the country during the financial collapse at the end of Bush’s Administration.  He has said that the stimulus spending (that both Democrats and Republicans said was necessary at the time) would temporarily add to the country’s debt.  President Obama has told us that our national debt is unsustainable and insists that a bi-partisan plan is essential to put the long-term debt in reverse.  This is in contrast to Senate Republicans who recently voted against forming a commission to develop a debt reduction plan, and former V.P. Dick Cheney who famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.”  So much for “Democrats are the party of fiscal irresponsibility.”

Then, there’s “Paygo” —  the Democratic Party’s policy of matching every spending increase with a spending cut elsewhere in the budget.  The President describes it as, “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”  The Democrats instigated this “pay-as-you-go” budgeting under President Clinton, then the Bush Administration and his Republican Congress let the policy lapse in order to give tax breaks to the rich.  The Dems have just reinstated this policy and President Obama has signed it back into law.

How about this old Conservative canard? — “Obama has lost American jobs, and only Republican “trickle-down” policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy actually creates jobs.” 

To rebut that particular right-wing assertion we went searching on the Internet and discovered another interesting graph last week, which we copied to use in this post.  Although David Plouffe (Obama adviser) beat us to the punch by choosing the same graph to use in e-mails he sent out on Wednesday, we decided to go ahead and include it here anyway.   So, to those of you who have already seen this graph:  please enjoy it again;  and to those who are seeing it for the first time, look it over and be among the informed.

* JOB LOSSES DECREASE DRAMATICALLY IN ONE YEAR *

With this visual it’s hard to maintain that Obama is costing us jobs, and that only Republican’s broad-based tax cuts (which primarily benefit the wealthy) really spur economic growth and job creation.  Once these facts are coupled with the Clinton record we begin to have a clearer picture of reality.  President Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy early in his first term, which was followed by a booming economy and record job growth — despite the dire warnings of Congressional Republicans and right-leaning economists who all predicted financial and economic calamity!

The revisionist history that the right is attempting to make these days is truly astounding.  Now they’re all railing against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and claim that the stimulus it provided to the economy was just all “wasteful, Democratic spending which only piled debt onto our nation.”  (Interesting isn’t it, that NOW they are worried about adding to the debt?)  — See graph above for accurate depiction of which party really piles up debt.    

The majority of Republicans (Congressional and right-leaning economists)  actually advocated for a large economic stimulus package last year.  Remember?  The Democrats passed a $757B package;  the Republicans advocated for a $500B package.  But, somehow they’d like us to think that their $500B stimulus wouldn’t have added to the debt?  Newsweek’s Jon Meachem actually got Republican talk show host, Joe Scarborough (Morning Joe, February 19), to admit that the additional debt levels we’re now experiencing would have been about the same even if John McCain were President.  Facts are facts.

Politics are being played here folks — along with a really healthy dose of revisionist history.  Many critics of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are actually practicing personal revisionist history with their own previous positions.  116 Congressional Republicans have been caught actually taking credit for the stimulus projects in their home states.   These projects were funded by The Recovery Act stimulus that they had voted against in Congress.  These Republicans even bragged that this money would produce jobs in their home states.  Whoa — produce jobs — economic stimulus produces jobs?  They’re on record saying that, so I suppose we should believe them.  They have even gone so far as to attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies for these projects and smiling for media photos.  We gotta call “hypocrisy” when it’s this blatant.

The debt levels we’re now experiencing are due to the financial meltdown — much lower revenues are coming in — and the economic stimulus that all agreed needed to be put in place to save the country from another Great Depression.  This additional debt load is necessary and temporary.  

The CBO, Congressional Budget Office which is nonpartisan,  reports that up to 2.4 million jobs exist today that would not have existed without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  Fully one-third of the stimulus was in the form of tax cuts:  95% of working families got tax cuts and small business also saw lower taxes. 

The rest of the package provided funding for small business loans;  transportation construction;  relief for the states which are facing record budget shortfalls;  and billions for the nation’s future in the form of investments in science and technology innovation.

But, this is an election year.  So you don’t hear the right-wing admitting that stimulus was the right thing to do for the economy (which most of them agreed with at the time, including John McCain and Joe Scarborough)— no, what you hear is political posturing for a short-term election year gain.  And, if the citizens of this country wake up and realize how they’ve been deceived, again…the right-wing is toast.

“Small Government and Tax Cuts = Good!” Great slogan, too bad it doesn’t work out in the real world. Take a look at what’s going on in Colorado Springs right now —here’s where ideology meets reality. We lived in Colorado Springs in the ‘90s and saw for ourselves what the ultra-conservative political climate has wrought in this lovely town. Here’s the background.

In 1991 a man named Doug Bruce, an avid Conservative tax-hating small-government ideologue, managed to convince Colorado Springs voters to pass restrictive city tax legislation that continues to hamstring the city to this day. Check it out here at a local Colorado Springs newspaper, The Independent, and at The Denver Post. Colorado Springs is out of funds and cannot raise taxes to keep the city running, much less plan investments for any kind of economic future. In other words, Colorado Springs is the research experiment for where the small government/anti-tax Conservatives want to take the country — we can see what happens when tax cutting eliminates services that most communities take for granted.

The Denver Post reports that “more than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark; the city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops; water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead…recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools (and museums) will close for good; buses no longer run on evenings and weekends; (and) the city won’t pay for any street paving.”

Closing pools, recreation centers, museums? No street paving? Not enough police and firefighters? No bus service in the evenings and weekends? The police helicopters are even for sale on the Internet. And dozens of necessary police and firefighting positions will not be filled. What kind of life do these government hating Conservatives want to create for Americans?

Criminal justice student, Addy Hansen, is an outspoken opponent of these draconian budget cuts, “We’re the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We’re in trouble. We’re in big trouble.”

Colorado Springs offers us an opportunity to take a good look at the real-life results of the Conservative approach to governing. Street lights and cut backs in police and firefighters, these may seem like small-potatoes to the country. But the ideology that is constraining Colorado Springs, if implemented nationally, would impact our country in many ways that would lead to the decline of American power in the world.

It’s time for Americans to understand that the Conservative mantra of “Small Government and Tax Cuts = Good” is a political slogan that represents an ideology that does not take us as a nation to a healthy and prosperous future.

The ideology that tells us that we should cut taxes because “we as citizens know how to spend our money better than the government” does not play out in the real world. As individual citizens we can’t raise a military, we do that as a national community through our taxes. We join our taxes together to make our country better and more effective in many important ways: police force; firefighters; CIA and FBI; safe food supply; city lights and paved roads; and yes — our safety-net of Social Security/Medicare and Medicaid.

The days of the old west frontier are over folks. It’s time to throw out the old mantras and do some serious long-range thinking about where we want to take our country and how America will fit into the new world economy. We’re already behind much of our competition in the world in 21st century infrastructure, high-speed rail, and in developing new-energy markets.

Taxes for our new future need to be more fair. Tax reform needs to focus on helping to build a stronger middle class, which will support a growing, thriving economy. The tax structure and anti-regulation ideology of the last 30 years of Conservative policies has led our nation to the economic failure we are now experiencing. Even before the financial meltdown 18 months ago the economy was shaky and the recoveries that follow recessions were becoming weaker and weaker.

Tax reform is something that both political parties should be interested in working on together. The old economics have failed — broad based tax cuts for everyone! — and we need a new “smart” approach to building an economy for a new future. We should tax things we want to discourage and stop taxing things we want to encourage. We should tax soft drinks that are unhealthy, and tax gasoline consumption to free America from our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. And, we should cut taxes to encourage research and entrepreneurship.

Without tax reform we won’t have the means to invest in education and infrastructure, healthcare and development of an American new-energy market, we will be a nation in decline, stuck in the past — not ready for the new century.

We’re losing our ability to lead in the world. The financial crisis caused by greed on Wall Street has hobbled our ability to influence friends and foes. But even more alarming, new questions about the United States are being raised around the world. Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, reported from the Davos World Economic Forum that he “heard of a phrase being bandied about here by non-Americans — about the United States — that I can honestly say I’ve never heard before: political instability.” Check out the full column, read it here.

Republicans have been more and more captured by the extreme right-wing of their party, and have swung so far right that not only would Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and even Ronald Reagan not recognize their own party, neither would Barry Goldwater, one of the fathers of the Conservative movement.

President Obama came into office offering a bi-partisan approach and his proposed legislation has been mainstream, with many conservative ideas such as tax breaks for small businesses and the middle class. The Democrats have offered a centrist health care plan that is very similar to one offered to the Clinton administration by Republicans in the 1990’s, and is more conservative than the Massachusetts universal healthcare plan enacted by former Republican Governor Mitt Romney. And the Massachusetts universal health care plan even got a “yes” vote from that state’s newly elected Republican Senator, Scott Brown — who was hypocritically supported by the Tea Party that was at the same time calling President Obama a Marxist for supporting a similar plan for the country!

Politics are being played, and there will be serious fall-out for our nation.

In 1974 Richard Nixon offered a more progressive universal health care plan, which even included employer mandates. And yet, the Republican Party has hypocritically screamed “socialism!” about the current health care proposals and made a political calculation to reject every attempt to find middle ground with Democrats. They seem to feel that if they just say no, and demagogue Democratic ideas, that they can whip-up the far right-wing (the same folks who got W. re-elected) and take over Congress in this November’s elections.

What then? Do they have new, 21^st century ideas to solve our enormous problems? Or are they offering the same old ideas that have been tried and disproven? And, we know for sure that when there’s a Republican Congress and a Democratic President that the Republicans will pull out all the stops and go so far as to even look for lame excuses to impeach an American President rather than get serious about solving the country’s problems.

Government is not broken, but our country’s politics is.

The slash-and-burn aggressive tactics of the right are appalling, not only to most mainstream Americans, but are also embarrassingly visible to the rest of the world. Their willingness to use out-and-out lies to whip the passions of concerned Americans into a fear-frenzy, is shocking.

If the Republican Party is not going to step up and help govern the nation (unless they can be in charge) and instead block any action, then we have become a politically unstable country. Our political paralysis, which causes so much uncertainty about how to solve our nation’s huge problems, is casting in us a very questionable light in the world and making the world nervous about the future of America.

Why do we care? The dangerous perception that America is politically unstable will have serious repercussions.

The world will not invest in countries that are politically unstable. It’s not just the residual effects of the financial meltdown that is keeping our country mired in limbo, it’s this political paralysis created by a calculated political decision to “just say no.” The uncertainty that results from this obstructionism is working against our economic recovery and causing the rest of the world to question our stability.

Tom Friedman tells us, “Banks, multinationals and hedge funds often hire foreign policy experts to do ‘political risk analysis’ before they invest in places like, say, Kazakhstan or Argentina. They may soon have to add the United States to their watch lists.”