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Real Economist Paul Krugman Calls Republican Budget A Trillion Dollar Con Job

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Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:40 pm

A scam is a fraudulent business scheme, or a swindle, and a deliberate ploy to defraud ignorant, naïve, and stupid people out of their money or assets. There are many reasons idiots fall for obviously dubious “deals,” and stupidity aside, greed is often the culprit. But fear of losing something certainly plays a role. Republicans have had a thirty year run convincing stupid poor people looking to get rich, and morons terrified of other Americans taking their “stuff,” that giving up everything they have to the wealthy will magically transform a dirt-poor imbecile into a billionaire, save Americans’ liberty in the process, and teach the government who’s boss.

Republicans only know one approach to economic policy; the abject failure and scam known as trickle down with a healthy dose of Draconian austerity. Those features epitomize the most recent budget proposal Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman officially and accurately labeled as a “trillion dollar con job.” The only purpose of the GOP’s con-job, as Krugman and conscious Americans are aware of, is to “make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer” and increase the deficit by trillions of dollars.

The GOP House and Senate budgets are typically “deficit hawk” con jobs because they duly blow up the nation’s deficit to the tune of “several trillion dollars in just the first decade” according to Krugman. It is the 2001-2008 Bush Republican economic agenda on steroids and a neo-con machination to economically rape the masses out of everything they have, transfer it to the rich, and break the federal government once and for all.

Now, the reason Paul Krugman’s assessment of the Republican budget proposal is prescient is not just because he is a Nobel-winning economist, although that is important, but because he is not a politician. He also is not a devotee of the conservative method of scoring economic proposals known as ‘dynamic scoring.’ Dynamic scoring is a conservative trick of ‘assessing‘ a budget on the basis of what they say it will magically do; not according to mathematics and reality. Of course, Republicans understand their budget is a con job; the created it that way. They also know Americans are inherently stupid and have fallen for the same scam for thirty-plus years and will give up everything to preserve liberty, eviscerate the government, and magically become millionaires.

Krugman noted that there are two specific “trillion-dollar magic” asterisks in the latest House and Senate Republican budgets; one on spending, and one on revenue that the real economist says is “actually an understatement.” What is missing in each proposal are specific and revenue enhancements Republicans claim produce “mysterious savings and untold new revenue.” The lack of any specifics was well-planned and a deliberate ploy because Republicans knew in advance if anything was clearly explained, even the stupidest American would not support their diabolical scam; particularly a scam devised last year by neo-conservative groups like the Senate Conservative Fund and Heritage Foundation. The intent of both conservative groups was “to make the rich richer and ordinary people much poorer” and decimate the government as a value-added bonus.

Since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, each and every one of the Heritage Foundation budgets Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan submitted were advertised as “courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt.” Naturally, the one-time bipartisan Congressional Budget Office and anyone with a brain understood Ryan’s budgets included “trillions of dollars in imaginary, unexplained savings and new sources of revenue.” It is why when the Koch brothers bought the Senate, Republicans immediately installed a trickle down devotee as the new head of the CBO to produce the same “dynamic scoring” projections Kansas Governor Brownback utilized to send the state into debt and deficit Hell. It is no surprise then that the House and Senate budgets dutifully follow the Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana economic models of crushing deficits, tax cuts for the rich, and dire cuts to healthcare, education, transportation, and social programs.

All the while, the rich and corporations received tax cuts that no Republican is ever going to rescind no matter the damage to their state or its residents any more than a Republican Congress will ever raise taxes on the richest one-percent. It is important to remember that even as Kansas economy began drowning in debt and hemorrhaging revenue due to Brownback’s trickle down madness, Senator Mitch McConnell told Brownback Republicans would do “the exact same thing in Washington” as soon as they gained control of Congress. It is likely the one time in McConnell’s career he was not lying and Republicans in the House and Senate followed through on his word.

What both the House and Senate budgets do is produce “huge transfers of income” from the poor and working class through “severe benefit cuts” to the rich who will get huge tax cuts. As Krugman says in his column, both the House and Senate budgets “are deliberately intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do; make the rich richer and ordinary people much poorer;” crushing deficits according to Republicans “just don’t matter” if the wealthy take everything.

None of these Republican cuts are typical even for inhumane conservatives; they are “beyond horrendous.” In fact, they are so drastic that even an economist aware of the Republicans’ typical economic deceit noted the “modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics.” By now, most people are aware of incredibly drastic cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, education, and infrastructure. But there is also an immediate end to the Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies Republicans devised to double the number of Americans without healthcare insurance.

There are many more unbelievable cuts Republicans concealed from the public under the guise of ‘unspecified savings‘ such as drastic cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and completely abolishing the Affordable Care Act. Another mystery of ‘unspecified savings‘ in the GOP budgets is how abolishing Dodd-Frank financial reform produces deficit reduction and new revenue, but dynamic scoring says it does…magically.

Krugman noted that “It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.” Republicans have never been scrupulous about anything so it is inherently necessary to assume anything they say is a blatant lie and when it involves economic policy, it is a con job. It is also why the Obama Administration’s fiscal pronouncements have delivered as advertised; they are based on facts and not magic or scams.

It is a pity that many, many Americans are either disinterested or too lazy to examine what Republicans intend to impose on them. Obviously, the results of the midterm elections mean that when Republicans campaigned that budget deficits were destroying freedom, religion, and preventing America from being a population of billionaires, even though deficits are falling, the idiots believed the scam.

Krugman did not pull any punches and said of the Republican con job budget; “Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.” Krugman should tell it like it really is; Republicans are just dirty filthy liars and most Americans are too stupid to see it even as they lose everything they have. If the media did its job, it would not be left to just a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Paul Krugman to inform Americans and that is precisely why Republicans continue conning the American people.

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Rmuse

Audio engineer and instructor for SAE. Writes op/ed commentary supporting Secular Humanist causes, and exposing suppression of women, the poor, and minorities. An advocate for freedom of religion and particularly, freedom of NO religion.

Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn't look good.

Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.