I’m a huge fan of roadrunner cartoons, and love that moment when Wile E. Coyote realizes that he is not standing on anything and plummets back to earth.
Isn’t that exactly the situation the GOP is facing now? Everyone is talking about the fiscal cliff that is coming up. But they don’t often mention that the reason we face a fiscal cliff is because Republicans are holding our government hostage, refusing to even consider allowing Bush’s tax cuts on the rich to expire. They claim that raising taxes on the rich would slow down the economy and hurt job creation. However, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that allowing the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire would increase GDP by 1.3% and create 1.6 million jobs, and would also lower the deficit. In fact, holding the government budget hostage is what is damaging to our economy, so it is clear that the GOP is not actually concerned about that, and in fact may be purposely trying to damage the economy in order to blame it on Obama. Making this even more ironic is that exit polls during the election say that only one-third of voters think that taxes should not be raised. And if the government is forced to shut down, voters say they are more likely to blame it on the Republicans.
So you have a situation where the GOP is willing to do something that hurts our country, will cost them votes, and is based on blatant lies, just to give huge financial gifts to the rich. Are they really that beholden to the 1%? Now that they were repudiated in the election, you would think that they had learned their lesson. We’ll see how this plays out.
It also doesn’t help when the media uses false equivalency to make it sound like both sides are unwilling to compromise, as if there are actually two sides to this issue. Even dumb jokes, like Jay Leno saying “the Democrats are driving us over a cliff” (in the previous post) are extremely annoying to me.
3 Comments
Leno does a great disservice to the country by making cheap and easy jokes that are based on partisan lies.
If Limbaugh tells a bald-faced lie, everyone other than his dittoheads sees it for what it is.
When Leno uses that lie as a basis for jokes night after night, it becomes conventional wisdom. Shame on you, Jay.
Yeah, Leno is certainly not a favorite of mine. I remember maybe six months back when seemingly every one of his jokes included “Obama” and “$14 trillion”. The order of the two and the other words involved would change, but those were always there.
Let’s be realistic. The crux of a detour from this tiresome cliff is spending discipline coupled with more tax revenue. (c.f. Bill Clinton, first term.) True enough, Republicans need to overcome an addiction to out-of-touch 80s tax policies, but Democrats need to put down their Samuelson Econ 101 text books, and venture into the present time to appreciate market-based decisions and the important role of capital formation. They certainly appreciate Wall Street’s utility well-enough for raising campaign funds.