The Republicans think that the worse the economy, the better they will do in the next election. After all, it worked in the 2010 election. How long before we wise up?
Nineteen different polls since the start of 2011 show that Americans support raising taxes to reduce the deficit, often by a large margin. And yet Republicans say that raising taxes is absolutely unacceptable and completely off the table.
And Ezra Klein points out that we don’t actually have a deficit problem, we have a Congress problem. If Congress does absolutely nothing, then the deficit actually goes away!
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Somehow over the last 25-39 years (and it has gotten progressively worse with time), the Republican Party has enabled the election of some real loons at the local, state and federal level. Hell, loons are even rising to the top…Palin, Gingrich, Bachman, Santorum, etc.
I think Boehner may be telling the truth when he says there won’t be enough votes to include even closing egregious loopholes in our tax code…no matter what a majority of the American people think. Seriously folks, if we don’t get our heads out of our asses and quit electing these people (at all levels), we’re going to lose our middle class and become a second class nation.
So you think the problem with the economy is that the deficit is too large? And if only we raised taxes and cut spending enough the economy would be booming? Hmm…
The deficit and the debt are a drag anchor on the economy. But Max is also correct, fixing the deficit isn’t going to fix the economy by itself.
Bottom line, economies grow by creating new wealth – new products, new services, or. New markets. Reshuffling the current wealth only benefits shufflers – and the already wealthy. We need to jumpstart new wealth, and the most likely areas are green tech, nanotech, and biotech. Green tech has the greatest chance to positively impact the current workforce, and nano tech has the greatest chance to radically create new workforces.
But as Obama keeps saying, we need to have the education and innovation support to help this happen. Cutting those services to save having CEO’s (with an average annual compensation over 10M) paying a few thousand dollars more in taxes – and no more than they were paying in the 90’s – is just brain dead.