The Tea Party and it’s bastard cousin the Tea Party Express (which is the highly funded corporate version) have rallies and cry about the spending in America. Unlike a lot of people who mock and make fun of them I have attended two rallies and will ask here what I asked the people at the rallies - since they couldn’t/wouldn’t answer.
1. Where were you from 2001-2008 when a record surplus was turned into a record deficit? If you really cared about the debt there is absolutely no defense for defending the Bush Tax cuts which take trillions away from the Government to pay bills. What is more important that extra couple dollars in your bank account or your kids future? Why not protest the defense spending increase, Medicare Part D, Oil Company handouts, Wall Street bailouts?
2. Why can you support Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor? These 2 men along with many other republicans passed votes that added trillions to the debt including Tax Cuts, Medicare Part D, Auto Bailouts, Bank Bailouts, War Spending and both voted to increase the national debt multiple times without spending cuts. Neither man cared about spending when republicans where in power and they supported the massive expansion of the Government at the time.
3. How can you like Ronald Reagan while not liking Bill Clinton? When Clinton left office we where on a path to pay off the national debt in 20 years, he reformed welfare and for the first time in a long time the government was taking in more money then it was spending. Millions and millions of public sector jobs where created and everyone was doing better. Under Reagan he spent twice as much as all the presidents before him combined and had a massive expansion of government jobs and the military which helped make his unemployment numbers look better.
4. What spending will you cut? Everyone I talked to said they didn’t want their Medicare or Social Security cut, they didn’t want their taxes raised and they thought we should spend more on military defense. If all that is off limits and you cut everything else completely we would still be adding to the national debt.
It’s easy to blame President Obama on the spending but the facts prove that is a lie. Since he took office he has only increased the spending by 300 billion dollars a year over President Bush’s last budget. When Obama took office the country was spending 3.5 trillion dollars a year and this year we are spending 3.8 trillion. Yes I blame Obama for the 300 billion dollar increase but it is a small drop in the bucket and is a slower growth then most presidents. To blame President Obama for the whole debt spending each year you are either lying and know it or you are really uniformed and just believe what Fox News tells you.
Yes the spending is out of control and needs to be reigned in but you can gut all spending but if you refuse to raise taxes or stop expanding the military we will continue to run debt. If Mitt Romney win in 2012 he will still have to pay for all the government programs and his budget while gutting social safety nets will still run trillion dollar debt for years.
If you think republicans are better at running things just look at the state level where 9 out of the 10 poorest states are heavily republican states who have been using austerity measures like they want to at the federal level. At the same rate 9 of the 10 lowest scoring school systems are also in republican run states again showing what they plan would do to the nation. The debt when Reagan took office was 700 billion, since Reaganomics republicans have had the white house for 20 of the 30 years and the debt is now at 15 trillion. Facts are a funny thing and that’s why they are often ignored by both parties.
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