Congressional Republicans: Trillion Dollar Fraudsters

The GOP shysters in Congress have yet again prepared a smoke and mirrors budget that would attack the social safety net - or what's left of it - for millions of Americans while yet again cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.  While labeled as a deficit reduction plan, the same old trickle down economics would instead explode the deficit.  Time and time again the GOP pushes the same old policies expecting some miracle to make the numbers work even though they never will balance.  It's a classic example of insanity.  Yet their heads are so far up their asses - or up the asses of the Christofascists and vulture capitalists - that they remain blind to objective reality.  Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman has a piece in the New York Times that rightly rips the Congressional GOP a new one.  Here are excerpts:

By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.

The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security.

[B]oth budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.

Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.

I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt  . . . 

We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

There are two takeaways: (i) the lying and dishonesty of the GOP has increased as the Christofascist have gained power in the party (no one lies more than the "godly folk") and (ii) the GOP's use of racism and feigned support for "religious freedom" is used to dupe the other cretins in the party base to support policies that will directly harm them.  Cynical doesn't begin to describe the GOP con job.