After eight years of Bush/Cheney Republicans now want to blame President Obama and the last Democratic controlled congress for double digit unemployment and an astronomical federal deficit. Who are they kidding? When Bush/Cheney came into office they inherited from President Clinton and the Democrats an almost $300 billion budget surplus, full employment, and a booming economy. In eight years Bush/Cheney and the Republican majority congress squandered the budget surplus so that at the end of their reign the economy was in such bad shape and unemployment so high that it required emergency "stimulus". They then initiated the better than $700 billion "Troubled Asset Relief Fund" to "bailout" the economy. Who were the beneficiaries of this taxpayer funded "relief"? The Republicans favored friends - Wall Street banks, not average unemployed Americans who would have had to spend the money just to live on - thereby actually stimulating the economy. Did the Wall St. banks lend the money to businesses that could use it to create jobs? No, they took the interest free taxpayer funded gift from their good Republican friends and invested it in Federal bills, bonds, and notes thus earning risk free returns.
The $700 billion above is just for starters! Bush/Cheney and Republicans pushed the federal deficit to much better than a trillion dollars by blatantly lying to the American public about the dire necessity to invade Iraq (with no adequate planning to administer the country once we took control). If this was not insane enough they then convinced the John ("hell no, cry baby") Boehner Republican congress to reduce taxes for their corporate cronies and the Richy Rich Republican snobs they surround themselves with. Any freshman in economics 101 would know that starting wars and reducing taxes at the same time is fiscal insanity. But perpetual war is great for Bush/Cheney's corporate masters Hallibuton, Kellogg Brown, Blackwater, military industrial complex et. al.. (See war is a racket.)
Why would they do this? I mean besides the obvious enrichment. Because, what Republicans really want is government "of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations". Generally speaking they want no federal government period. In the Regan era it was known as "starve the beast", meaning the federal government. The approach was to slash funding for federal departments, agencies, PBS, etc. Now the Republican approach is to kill the beast through bankruptcy.
Where does all this leave us? With the Dem's in power just over two years, we now have Republicans campaigning and generally nattering on about deficits and how they're the responsible people that will lead us out of this mess. The mess that Republicans created!
