I could get behind this

Driftglass has an idea for allowing Obama to cave on a no-revenue, all-cut deal to raise the debt ceiling:

Well, everyone has an imaginary scenario, so here's mine.

The Obama Administration announces next week today that since the GOP refuses to participate in good faith in the actual work of governing the United States, in order to avoid defaulting on our national debt and sending the world into a global financial meltdown, the Administration would accede to Republican demands that all deficit reduction be accomplished solely by making radical cuts to existing government programs with no increase in taxes.

However, in the spirit of the Time Honored Conservative Principle of Federalism, the President adds that the cuts would not be allocated programmatically, but geographically by state.

[snip]

Under the Obama Administration's proposed "Reward Wealth Producers and Penalize Moochers American Value Re-alignment" Act, "wealth producing" states such as New York, California, Illinois who have traditionally received less than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes would be exempt from any budgetary cuts, and would qualify for across-the-board tax cuts since wealth-producing states should always be accommodated and encouraged in every way possible, regardless of circumstances.

On the other hand, the "welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking" states such as Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Alaska who have for years gotten away with parasitically looting their wealth-producing neighbors by receiving more than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes will now assume 100% of the responsibility for eliminating the federal budget deficit. Each of these welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states will be given a block rescission amount representing the percentage of the federal deficit for which they will be now be help legally responsible.

I'm on board. Let's get moving with it.

Yeah, I already know the answer: "When the Jets beat the Colts tonight"

When the hell are the Democrats going to start hammering in "Deficit-Exploding Tax Cuts" or "Budget-Busting Tax Cuts" the way the Republicans are hammering "Job-Killing Health Care Bill" (and everything else, despite the fact that however meager it is, and however low-paid, there is actually some job growth going on in the private sector, which is more than could be said about the Bush Administration, which left us this mess)?

Yes, I know, the answer is "When hell freezes over", but when the Republicans are this ripe for the picking, a party with the political savvy of your average high school student council president would know to make hay of this:

U.S. House Republicans, who swept into power promising to rein in the federal deficit, have proposed policies in their first week that would make the shortfall worse.

Moves to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care law and promises to extend Bush-era tax cuts and offer other breaks would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, based on reports from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.

In one of their first votes, Republicans changed anti- deficit rules to allow for tax cuts that aren’t paid for by savings elsewhere in the budget. New spending would have to be offset with cuts elsewhere, though tax increases to fund new programs would be prohibited.

“They are willing to increase the deficit if it comes as a result of things they want to do, specifically tax cuts,” said Stan Collender, a former congressional budget aide and now managing director of Qorvis Communications in Washington. “It’s a little disingenuous at best.”

The new Republican exemptions to the so-called pay-go budget rules will be “dead on arrival in the Senate,” Senator Charles Schumer a New York Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Extending tax cuts for the highest-income Americans for just two years, as Congress did last month, will cost about $81.5 billion, according to a December report by the Joint Committee on Taxation. Extending lower rates on most capital gains and dividends will cost $53.1 billion over two years. A reduced estate tax rate will cost $68.1 billion. Over a period of 10 years, the cuts would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit, combined with a repeal of the health-care law.

The Republican mantle of "deficit hawks" simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Here is a chart showing the relationship of revenue to spending under administrations from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush:

(A larger version of this chart, and an analysis of the U.S. national debt over this time, can be found here.)

Republicans have succeeded in convincing Idiot America that the deficits we now face are caused solely by the stimulus and by the health care reform law, not by the fact that George W. Bush started two wars and instead of paying for them, told people to go shopping and gave huge tax cuts to "the haves and the have mores", silencing Idiot America with a few hundred extra bucks in their pockets.

The Republicans' triumphant reign over the House of Representative is off to as rocky a start as George W. Bush's was. If you recall, until the 9/11 attacks saved his bacon, the story of Bush II: Electric Bugaloo, was one of continuing controversy over the Florida recount, the U.S. spy plane that was taken in China, and when a military submarine containing moneybag Bush campaign donors, one of whom may have been at the controls, struck a Japanese fishing vessel. House Republicans may be marching in lockstep to the "job-killing' talking point, and they may believe that THEIR members don't have to adhere to House rules, but anyone who still thinks that this nation hasnt' just handed the keys to the legislative equivalent of an unrepentant angry drunk should wake the hell up.

Not even returning veterans take priority over making sure the already wealthy don't have to pay one penny more in taxes

Deficit insanity rules in the Republican Party, even if it means veterans returning from the war that these very same Republicans have used as a cudgel with which to beat Democrats for nearly a decade are homelsss.

Watch Mitch McConnell block legislation that would help homeless veterans:

That people being hurt by this recession are actually considering handing the keys to Congress back to these dark-hearted, greedy, venal, heartless bastards is just mind-boggling.

A funny thing happened on the way to eliminating the social safety net

David Dayen went to the Eliminate The Social Safety Net So Pete Peterson Can Have Even More Money In His Pockets Tour:

While the cumulative effect of all this tends towards social safety net cuts rather than tax fairness, the crowd in Los Angeles, at least, wasn’t biting at first. In surveying the discussion groups, most people seemed more concerned about the desperate need for more stimulus spending to move the economic recovery forward. They feared a double dip recession without job creation, and fretted about the lack of unemployment insurance extensions to help the less fortunate. “No one is talking about the long-term unemployed,” said one participant. In a nationwide poll, taken by participants through electronic devices at all 19 America Speaks sites, 61% said the government needed to do more to strengthen the recovery, with only 25% opposed. Even with a push poll question asking if participants supported government programs to increase growth “if it increases the deficit,” got a majority, 51%, of the group.

During the discussions about the long-term budget challenges, there was a greater tendency from the participants to place a greater burden for deficit reduction on those with the ability and capacity to do so. Among the anti-corporate sentiment, someone mentioned that Exxon paid $0 in federal taxes last year. During the scare film about the budget, a few people screamed “Wrong!” when it was suggested that defense makes up 20% of the total budget (that doesn’t include spending on wars). Lastly, people thought that the wealthy weren’t paying their fair share for the commons. Someone mentioned the carried interest loophole, allowing money managers to treat their income as capital gains instead of income, drastically lowering their tax rate. One of those money managers is Pete Peterson, the funder of America Speaks.

Mission Accomplished.

After all, isn't this the very goal the Bush Administration had in mind when it spent like drunken sailors for eight years?

By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

There's just one problem to this conservative paradise: It takes the entire country down with it to the point that even the wealthy can no longer raise their foam fingers and chant "We're Number One!":

Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

But even the author of this article has forgotten that George Bush was ever president or that the deficit was over a trillion dollars on January 20, 2009:

He is right. In the early years of the Clinton administration, government projections indicated huge deficits — over the “sustainable” level of 3 percent — by 2000. But by then, Mr. Clinton was running a modest surplus of about $200 billion, a point Mr. Obama made Monday as he tried anew to remind the country that the moment was squandered when “the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it.”

But with this budget, Mr. Obama now owns this deficit.

So let's just forget about that other guy. After all, facts are stupid things.