Dr. Tax-and-Spend or: How Robert Reich Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Deficit

According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, when, in 2002, he warned Dick Cheney that the budget deficit was expected to top $500 billion, Cheney retorted, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

Apparently, Robert Reich, midget Labor Secretary under Clinton, has mixed batches of Cheney- and Obama-flavored Kool-Aid (probably spiked with Marxist Everclear) and chugged it all. Then he chased it with some of Biden’s Buckler beer.

In a column titled “Why the deficit hysteria?  I only wish we’d borrow more” Reich lays out that deficits don’t matter because we’ll outgrow them anyway and that Obama should be spending even more.

Pay close attention, in particular, to the debt-to-GDP ratio. True, that ratio is heading in the wrong direction right now – it’s likely to reach 80% by the end of 2010. That’s high, but not compared with the 119% it reached in 1945, after the ravages of depression and war.

That’s right.  We’re not in trouble because we’re not as far in debt as we were at the end of World War Two.  Then we’d engaged in great power warfare against two major world powers and one minor one and supplied most of the free and Communist worlds to do it. Now, well…you see, the schools in California need more money…

Every expert who has looked closely at America’s crumbling infrastructure knows how badly it suffers from decades of deferred maintenance: bridges collapsing, water pipes bursting, sewers backed up, highways impassable, public transport in disrepair. Many schools are also falling apart, literally and figuratively. Schools in my new home state of California have laid off teachers, shredded their curriculums and shortened their school days, all for want of tax revenue during this deep recession. And unless this nation reduces its greenhouse gases, it and the rest of the world are heading for lots more trouble.

Reich then channels Biden.  Those of you who have been keeping up on current events will remember the last time Obama let him out in public, Joe Biden had some interesting things to say about the administration’s financial plans.

We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Here’s our undersized Labor Secretary’s take:

In this respect, national budgets are like family budgets. It’s dumb for an indebted family to borrow more money to take a world cruise. But it’s smart even for an indebted family to borrow money to send their kids to college. So too with the Obama budget. Public investments, just like family investments, build future wealth. They allow faster growth. They make the debt-to-GDP ratio even lower and more manageable over time.

The problem with the Democrats is that they think that it’s a given that college makes people more productive, while we at the Douchebag Report found that college is geared towards creating more Democrats, which only makes people bigger whiners.

Fortunately for the country’s financial health, the Republicans have somehow convinced the Democrats that they actually matter, politically.  How a completely demoralized and unorganized GOP managed to distract the Left’s drunken sailors from the nation’s open vault, after they’d grabbed everything in the tills, we’ll never know.  Maybe they were just laughing to hard at the midget trying to outspend them.

Switch Continues Part 2

So it looks like this story is going to become a series because Obama can’t help but do everything he can to reverse every one of his campaign promises.

1. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Bait:

“We support the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and the implementation of policies to allow qualified men and women to serve openly regardless of sexual orientation.”

Switch:

Not so fast: President-elect Barack Obama will not move for months, and perhaps not until 2010, to ask Congress to end the military’s decades-old ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, two people who have advised the Obama transition team on this issue say.

2. Lobbyists

Bait:

“I’m in this race to tell the lobbyists and the big fat cats that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. They have not funded my campaign.  They will not work in my White House.”

Switch:

3.Iraq

Bait:

Immediately upon taking office, Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: ending the war. The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.

Switch:

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

4. Change

Bait:

change

verb, changed, chang⋅ing, noun

–verb (used with object)

1.to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone: to change one’s name; to change one’s opinion; to change the course of history.

Switch:

The Clinton Administration II

JIM LEHRER: All right, speaking of the new administration, Mark, the word is today, or it’s the — the rumor is today — the word “rumor” is today that Hillary Clinton is going to be asked to be secretary of state by Barack Obama. What do you think of that?

DAVID BROOKS: I actually think that’s a good move. I’d hate to see any single member of the Clinton administration not in the Obama administration. Somebody might feel left out. I think he’s taking the whole group.

• Transition chief John Podesta – Clinton White House Chief of Staff
• White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel – Clinton Administration Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – Clinton Administration Cuckquean
• Chief of Staff of Vice President Ron Klain – Clinton Administration Chief of Staff of Vice President (Seriously?  Obama gave this guy the exact same job?  Seriously?)
• Attorney General Eric Holder – Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General
• Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner – Clinton Administration Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs