But it's not just social spending. You love military spending, but don't want to pay the taxes for it...
This is the Elephant size contradiction that keeps hitting conservatives in the ass which you just ignore. They want big-ass walls that cost 4 MILLION dollas a mile to keep the brownies out. They want roads just like everyone else. They also want their big ass American SUVs, insurance to cover them, and banks to be able to loan them money and I guarantee you that if Obama let them fail they'd be bitching then.
Like I said before, very few actually want to ride out the market healing itself, but it's easy to be a Tuesday morning armchair quarterback.
EXACTLY!
Most Americans, when asked about things like roads, education, renewable energy, health care research, deposit insurance, banking regulation,military, border control, elimination of drug cartels, the list goes on, want the government to step in and act.
However, we act as if all of this is free. I know the Republicans have popularized the "we can have it all, big spending AND no taxes" argument the last 8 years, but it has utterly failed.
Of course, we should not raise taxes more than necessary, nor should we raise them to the level of Sweden or Denmark or Canada. We need some modest tax increases (top 2 brackets returned to 1990s level, loopholes closed, and deductions limited for some and yes, cap and trade like McCain has supported) to bring in revenue. There is waste, farm subsidies, military programs that we dont need anymore, fraud, govt contracts, etc, but that does not mean the government does not need revenue.
Tea party people, dont even get me started on these knuckledraggers! Have they been asleep for 8 years? Protesting government spending and debt??? If I recall correctly, Bush left us with a $1.3 trillion deficit ,10 trillion in debt and a recession that is going to wind up being worse than 1982 when all is said and done. To think that Obama wanted to come in and spend 800 billion on a a stimulus and 700 billion and counting bailing out banks is ludacris; HE HAD TO. If the stimulus had not passed, if we were not creating a "bad bank" and subjecting banks to stress tests, the economy and our confidence in it would have TANKED COMPLETELY, we would have lost more revenue and the deficit would have been worse than its going to be. Obama has already said he is dead serious about the deficit and is the first President ever to identify the cause- entitlements(medicare,medicaid) and the cause of the cause, health care costs are out of control. Bush has wrongly focused on Social Security, which is by and large fine. Other hard decisions on taxes, farm subsidies, military procurement, payments to medical providers have been made in the FY 2010 budget to move toward deficit reduction. Obama does not lack for caring on the deficit as the protesters suggest. Even the deficit watchdog group the Concord Coalition(founded by a Democrat, Paul Tsongas and a Republican, Warren Rudman) has said that, given the state of the economy, the deficit was not the #1 concern immediately.
Before I get nailed to the wall here, let me just point out that I am not a blind Obama lover. He has had to earn my respect, voting for him was never even a foregone conclusion for me until around summer 2008. What gave me confidence in him is how he has been calm and delibrative through all of the economic collapse, offered substantive responses, taken on the biggest challenges to our future economic growth and most importantly, hired brilliant economic advisers who know what they are doing. These people are not socialists- these are centrists. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner are both market devotees through and through, Peter Orszag is a deficit hawk, Paul Volcker was the Chair of the Federal Reserve, firecely anti-inflation, and Austan Goolsbee is from the University of Chicago Economics department, hardly a bastion of socialism. These are not people that dont care about leaving us in debt, nor are they people who would just spend $800 billion on a stimulus unless we ABSOLUTELY HAD TO. Are we recovered yet? Of course not. But confidence is slowly returning, the market has shown signs of life, the stimulus money is hitting the economy, putting people to work, cutting their tax bills, etc. Growth will be back next quarter, unemployment will continue to rise, but it always peaks after recessions. We are coming out of this, and stronger than we would have had McCain been calling the shots, rest assured!
They are protesting earmarks? Do they even realize that new disclosure rules put in place by Democrats in Congress in 2007 have cut them nearly in half from their heyday under Hastert and DeLay, who used them to trade on votes from fellow Republicans? Obama never flip flopped on this, never said he would eliminate earmarks, only that they would have to pass a legitimacy test. Anyone who thinks the end of earmarks will solve any part of the deficit/debt problem needs a doctor.
Furthermore, what are they protesting?? Just like the original Boston Tea Party Organizers, who were acutally protesting a TAX CUT given to the British East India company, they are against their $400 or $800 tax cut they are getting from Obama?