Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 04:59 pm
Mitch McConnell was on ABC’s This Week today where he showed us exactly the kind of leadership Republicans will be giving the country if they win control of Congress. When asked how he would lower the deficit, McConnell said, “You get the economy going.” Yep, the big plan is to get the economy going.
Here is the video from ABC News:
When Christiane Amanpour asked McConnell how Republicans are going to reduce the budget deficit, he answered, “Let me tell you how I’d reduce the deficit. There are two things you need to do. Number one, you need to get spending down, and number two, we need to get the economy going… Everything that’s happened in the last year-and-a-half has been to pump up the government. We borrowed stimulus money. We spent it to hire new federal government workers. We sent it down to states so they would not have to lay off state workers. You have to get the economy going. That’s the way you narrow the deficit. You get the economy going. You get government spending down. Throw a tax increase in there, and we’re going to have this recession go on who knows how long.” (See the plan is to get the economy going).
Ah, but there is a reason why Amanpour doesn’t work for Fox News. She actually had the nerve to ask McConnell what he would cut. She wanted examples. McConnell answered, “Let me give you an example of something we’ve done already. Senate Republicans offered to freeze the top line on next year’s appropriations at essentially what we spent this year. The difference between that and what the president asked for over a 10-year period would be $300 billion. With regard to the entitlements, the president has appointed a deficit reduction commission. I’ve appointed three members to it. John Boehner has appointed three members to it. They’re going to report in December and make a recommendation about what we might do about our — our long-term unfunded liabilities. We’ll wait and see what they recommend, but hopefully it’ll be something that’d be supported on a bipartisan basis.”
Mitch McConnell is going to offset a $3.1 trillion tax cut, mostly for the rich, by cutting spending by $30 billion a year for ten years, which means that in as little as a hundred years the Bush tax cuts will be paid for. Here is where Republicans are different from Democrats. Republicans want to pass debt not only on to the next generation, but the generation after that, and the generation after that, and the generation after that. McConnell has no plan for reducing the deficit. He is still pushing trickledown economics as a way to stimulate the economy. Extending the tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent of Americans will not stimulate the economy.
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all engaged in trickledown economics and all of them did not balance a budget, and they added to the deficit. The last president to balance a budget was Bill Clinton. Guess what Clinton did? He cut taxes for the middle class and poor, and raised taxes for the rich, and the economy prospered. Mitch McConnell did a nice song and dance, but the truth that he not only has no plan to reduce the deficit. Republicans don’t care about the deficit, and they know that their plan will only add to our collective debt.
McConnell’s big plan to save America from generations of debt is to get the economy going. Gee, why didn’t Obama think of that? Oh wait. He has which is why the economy has actually been adding jobs this year. The issue isn’t getting the economy going. It is getting the economy going faster. McConnell and the Republicans don’t want to just drive us back into the ditch as Obama is fond of saying. They want to drive us off a cliff. Mitch McConnell is a man with a plan to win an election, just don’t expect him to have any answers for the nation’s problems.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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