The Audacity of Republican Hope

You really have to wonder about the memories of your everyday Republicans. You almost have to believe they think our memories match their own. That seems to be the audacity of Republican hope these days…They hope we will all forget they were in charge of Congress for most of two decades and of the White House for the last eight years.

I received the regular email from one of my Republican Senators yesterday. Senator John Cornyn has the new talking points down well. Like every other Republican these days he hopes we will forget the debt they ran up for their part of the Bush term. They ignore the fact that the deregulation they have pushed for decades, is the primary reason for the economic crisis we are in. For those of us in Texas, we have had the double whammy of the electrical deregulation approved under Governor Bush which has taken Texas from a regulated state with some of the lowest electrical rates to the new unregulated, market driven, free market electrical system with one of the highest rates in the nation in less than a decade.

But to here Sen. Cornyn tell it it’s all about the President’s budget and the debt it will run upin the next ten years.

In Washington, Congress continues to focus on President Obama’s proposed budget. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released an alarming report indicating that the President’s budget will create deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year for the next decade, and it would double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10 years.

Not only does this budget spend too much and tax our nation’s hard-working families and small businesses, it borrows far too much from future generations of Texans. I spoke on the Senate floor about the implications of this budget for students. Under the President’s budget, students who start college this year will see their share of the national debt grow from $19,000 per student to more than $36,000 per student after graduation from a four-year program. That is a tremendous burden to place on college graduates as they enter the workforce and begin their careers.

via email from John Cornyn

So here we have a number that tells us to ignore the fact that these students are already in debt for $19,000 before they even start college. $19,000 run up by these very Republicans that are telling each of us how bad it is that we are mortgaging our children’s future.

Excuse me…Didn’t you guys just screw everything up for eight years?

Students will ultimately end up after they finish their education and go on and enter the workforce, they’ll end up paying those higher taxes under this proposed budget. This proposed budget calls for $1.4 trillion in additional net taxes over the next 10 years. Students are trying to figure out how these higher taxes will actually impact the opportunities they will have as they enter the workforce. And some of them will hit these students at the toughest time, and that is right as they enter their first job.

Because we know the engine of job creation in America is our small businesses and in fact, those small businesses that employ between 10 and 500 employees, which are the principle job creators in our country, 50 percent of them will experience higher tax rates because many of them are not incorporated, they are single sole proprietorships, they are partnerships, they are sub-chapter S corporations, where the income actually flows through and is reported on an individual tax return. So it is just not true to say these will only affect the rich. indeed, it these will affect the very job engine that creates the jobs that we ought to be worried about retaining and, indeed, creating more of.

via United States Senator John Cornyn, Texas : For The Press.

For eight years we have fought wars, worked through a small recession, seen the economy collapse while the administration charge has told us to shop til we drop. Their answer for eight years has been, we need to lower taxes (at least for those at the top of the American food chain)…Oh, and SHOP. We did our part. We shopped until our credit cards were full. We borrowed against our homes to pay the bills and bought more…Were we not all patriotic Americans? Who exactly was it that changed the rules on the mortgage industry? Who was it that let the credit card industry decide to arbitrarily change their rates even when you were current on your debt?

So here we are, trying to buy our way out of a disaster of a free market meltdown being told by the guys who put us here thet we are wrong to do it…Oh, and we should lower taxes…Go figure.