wtfox?!

Republican delusions, deceptions, and denialism

downlo:

With a 2012 election looming, GOP candidates and leaders are insisting that we ought to blame a Democratic president who’s in his first term for decades of Republican policies. Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Republican leadership are asking us to overlook the calamitous and pretty much continual failures of governance by the GOP in their bid to retake the White House:

Leave aside for the moment that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and increased the debt ceiling 17 times. Forget also George W. Bush nearly doubled the debt or that the Bush tax cuts were the biggest driver of debt over the past decade, and if made permanent, would be continue to be so over the next. Pay no attention to the federal tax burden now at its lowest level in 60 years or income inequality at its highest level in 80 years after a decade of plummeting rates for America’s supposed job creators who don’t create jobs. Ignore for now that Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under President Bush and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to bump the debt limit $4 trillion during his tenure. Look away from the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the Medicare prescription drug program because, after all, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell voted for all of it.

And John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Mitch McConnell couldn’t possibly be wrong. They are, after all, Republicans.

As the recent campaigning by GOP candidates demonstrates, the party remains absolutely committed to the belief that cutting taxes (especially for the wealthiest) creates jobs and leads to economic growth. Just as Republicans refuse to accept scientific evidence for global warming, they are refusing to accept scientific evidence for the failure of their economic policies:

Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. They would prefer not to discuss it altogether. If forced to discuss it, they will generally either deny its existence or simply carry on as if it doesn’t exist.

The underlying facts […] are stark. Over the last few decades, income growth for most Americans has slowed to a crawl, while income for the very rich has exploded. That’s a reversal of the three decades following World War II, when all income groups got richer, with the poor and middle class rising at a faster rate than the rich. Crucially, the Congressional Budget Office’s new analysis shows that changes in government policy over this period have made inequality worse

[…]

The Republican plan is to slash taxes for the rich and programs for the poor, thereby massively increasing inequality.

That is a hard position to defend in the context of exploding inequality, and conservatives would rather not defend it. Instead the right’s response has been to persistently deny or ignore the facts. Rick Perry, pressed by a reporter to explain why he was proposing a tax plan that would widen income inequality further, replied, “I don’t care about that.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page today dismissed the Tax Policy Center, whose calculations persistently show the ways in which various Republican tax proposals would widen inequality, as “liberal.” It didn’t even pretend to dispute the substance of the calculations. Eric Cantor gave a speech about income inequality centering on stories about how his grandmother worked hard and pulled herself up by the bootstraps in the old days. It was a nice speech if you like stories about plucky grandmothers. It failed to grasp the central dilemma, which is that it was a lot easier for poor people to move up sixty years ago, when tax rates on the rich happened to be far higher, than it is today.

I honestly can’t fathom just how deluded these fools are.

Is it really delusion, though? I mean, the GOP has the Supreme Court’s explicit agreement that corporate personhood should be respected when it comes to the electorate, and they know that the average American has little to no idea how taxation works or how taxation (and deregulation, for that matter) affects things like job growth and opportunity. They’ve shown that they’re pretty damn canny when it comes to playing on that ignorance, as well as other aspects of their constituency, e.g. social conservatives in lower income brackets who vote against their self-interest in the expectation that, even if they personally remain poor, America will at least be more godly. Throw in “libertarians” and those who, referencing someone I can’t remember right now, view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires who’ll one day make it big and that’s a decent portion of the population who will share at least some of your views.

So, if it’s a delusion, it’s a pretty damn convenient one to have.