Political Crossfire Forums

the balanced budget in the 90s had mainly to do with the republican control of the congress. if you recall, the legislature creates laws, not the president

also, when clinton/democrats in congress raised taxes, a year later the republicans won in both houses, the first time in half a century. then clinton campaigned on and agreed to lowered taxes during his second term, a term that saw far increased growth (avg 4.2 gdp rate vs 3.2 in first term) as well as increased tax receipts and the balanced budget

Moved thread to The Soapbox as it did not meet requirements for being in the General Discussion forum.

the so-called Gingrich revolution.

To the title of the thread - GOP economics are wrong. But, so are Democrat economics.

Economics have little to do with political ideals. Political ideals hold that everyone should pay an equal percentage of their income, or that the rich should support the poor, depending upon the party. The reality is somewhere in the middle. Rich should pay a higher share, but the poor bear a responsibility also.

The GOP has now spent decades embracing failed economic theory, but because ideology trumps pragmatism or reality in their case, they keep pumping the same dead ideas:

-Trickle-down (now reinvented as tax breaks/goodies for "job creators")
-Completely unregulated markets (because the market will regulate itself)--ironically this is what led to the collapse which in turn EXPLODED the debt/deficit
-Starting un-paid for and unbudgeted-for wars
-Run up huge debt, then insist that gov't services be slashed to pay for it
-Defense is off-limits for any budget cuts
-Deficits don't matter. Except when a Dem is in office. So just keep piling them up, and when you lose office, make that the heart of your ideology: we NOW have to tackle the deficit.

In fact, that's been the M.O. for a while now: purposely underfund the gov't, run up huge debts, then turn back to the gov't as the place where you have to cut to pay for the debts. And by that we mean slashing things like programs for the poor, infrastructure, education, student loans--all those programs created for freeloaders.

Because as we also know, if you're poor in this country is because you're lazy and a failure. And if you're part of the 10%, it's because you have excelled in life and worked for every penny of it.

Let's face it, if the GOP were running a business it would have failed decades ago. But we live in a country where you can just keep printing money.