I'm wondering if the American public is slipping into a sort of Alzheimer's that lets them forget the past almost completely while railing against "big government". "What do you mean?", you ask.
Are the folks who are almost rabidly shouting for "cutting the deficit" and a balanced budget aware that a largely Republican-controlled Congress passed FIVE (count 'em!) separate bills raising the national debt during the George W. Bush administrations for about 4 TRILLIAN dollars total. Can we have already forgotten that the Bush administration inherited the largest surplus passed from one president to another in history and Bush passed on the largest deficit in the history of the country?
And now the party that pushed the theme "jobs! jobs! jobs!" in the 2010 elections is suddenly so deficit-conscious that they are eying severe reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? (Oh, and by the way -- essentially little or no attention has been meaningfully paid to job creation in the U.S. House of Representations until this group of "job! job! jobs!" screamers. No. They've mostly looked at ways to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, PBS and NPR. Ever heard of "bait and switch"? We're getting it, fellow citizens.
In a time of economic uncertain, most economists warn against traditional belt-tightening. If we follow the Tea Partyers and Rethuglicans on this one, we're lemmings.
