It's still the Democrats fault

Well, in other news yesterday, Denny Hastert pleaded guilty to a single money shuffling charge in order to avoid having to say where the money went, which has been pretty well speculated on elsewhere. In a probably unrelated story, Boehner passed a budget bill with a majority of the majority....of Democrats. Republicans control the house and the senate, and yet, to actually pass a bill, the final breakdown was as follows Democrats 187 for, Republicans 79 for, Republicans 167 against. I think that's pathetic. As the party in power, Republicans control the committees and hence, could offer up tons of cuts. Instead, they dump it on the Democrats to pass a bill that allows them to keep their pork. And from what I read, this deal was worked out between Boehner, Pelosi, McConnell and Reid.

When Obama vetoed the last bill a couple of weeks ago, I received a histrionic email from my congressman, Joe Heck, that was wailing about using the military as hostages. The reason he was making the claim was this, in essence, the Republicans wanted to increase military spending and couldn't do it because of the sequester. So, they wanted to add some multiple billions to the military through off budget accounting, which is kind of a scam. In this case, I actually have some sympathy for the tea bags who are complaining about this bill that just passed, it increases spending and circumvents the sequester. Yet, as I read the post article, in order to get more Republicans to vote for, there has already been promises made to fix what will initially be a cut of like 3 billion dollars in crop insurance programs in future spending bills.

So, here is my gripe to start the daily flame war. It continues to astonish me that Republicans are seen as the party of fiscal responsibility. The charge perpetually leveled at Democrats is that they are the party of tax and spend. And while I think that is not an honest representation, I have to say that raising taxes in order to spend more money is far more honest than what the Republicans have offered. They want spending for their agenda just as surely as the Democrats do, however, they don't want to pay for it by either raising taxes, or by equally cutting programs they support along with cutting programs they don't support. Undoubtedly, this raise in the debt will be blamed on Obama despite the fact that Republicans truly do hold the purse strings and can't get their heads out of their ass to pass a real budget.

The sequester was meant to do what legislators don't want to do, which is arbitrarily make cuts in everything. However, just like Reagan's famous closing of tax loop holes, the legislators have gone back and basically exempted everything important in order to avoid the cuts. In essence, they want to wail about the debt and run on it as a campaign issue, but they don't ever want to put in a consequence in place, like raising taxes. Collectively, it is clear we want the spending we have, seniors want their benefits, farmers want their benefits, poor people want to drive cadillacs and eat fillet every night without working for it while additionally wanting pocket money to help them get to the polls to vote for more free shit that only Democrats hand out. We want the spending, but don't want to pay for it. Again, while I find the social outlook of tea baggers to be batshit crazy, I can't deny they have an honesty here in their position. That said, what they don't acknowledge is that the rest of America, who doesn't support the teas enough to give them full control, collective wants the spending where it is. To me, the only honest thing to do is to look back at America and say that if you want all of these programs that benefit both left and right, then it's time to raise taxes to pay for them.