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At its core, the Republican strategy is simple and elegant: When Republicans are in power, run up as much debt as possible, mostly by borrowing and giving that cash to the Republican donor class through tax cuts and corporate subsidies; when Democrats have political power, Republicans suddenly become hysterical about the debt and demand that Dems keep taxes low while cutting social spending.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the nation’s debt was a mere $908 billion. He nearly tripled it, to $2.6 trillion,
Reagan, Bush, Bush (and now Trump) all—every one of them—proposed and signed budgets that massively increased the national debt, year after year, relentlessly.
When a Democratic president is in office, however, or even (like 2019) when Democrats control part or all of Congress and want to go big, the Republicans in on this long con scream about the debt on every show, every day.
The national debt, right now, at about 100 percent of GDP, is large, and servicing that debt costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could find better uses.
That said, though, it’s nowhere near as high as it was after World War II, when we paid it down by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and stimulating the economy with direct-benefit-to-workers programs including infrastructure, union jobs, free college education (the GI Bill), and building a social safety net. We could easily do it again
The Chance for Peace speech, also known as the Cross of Iron speech, was an address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron
Eisenhower expressed regret for having set the precedent of large peacetime military expenditures.
From: _The White House Years 1956-61_ by Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Quote:
During the years of my Presidency, and especially the latter years, I began to feel more and more uneasiness about the effect on the nation of tremendous peacetime military expenditures.
But in mid-1953, after the end of the Korean War, I determined that we would not again become so weak militarily as to encourage aggression. This decision demanded a military budget that would establish, by its very size, a peacetime precedent.
The makers of the expensive munitions of war, to be sure, like the profits they receive...Each community in which a manufacturing plant or a military installation is located profits from the money spent and the jobs created in the area...All of these forces, and more, tend, therefore, to override the convictions of responsible officials who are determined to have a defense structure of adequate size but are equally determined that it shall not grow beyond that level. In the long run, the combinations of pressures for growth can create an almost overpowering influence. Unjustified military spending is nothing more than a distorted use of the nation's resources.
Trump had 2 years to fund and build the wall. Why is it suddenly an emergency now if it wasnt an emergency last year?
It has been such since the Democrats reneged on what they promised since the 1980's with Reagan giving something, and not getting what they promised in return.
But no doubt you and others would be happy to keep kicking this can down the road until we are overwhelmed with illegal aliens than the 20 or so million that have come in since then, right?
It's not an emergency. The only emergency is Individual 1's failed treasonous presidency. If there was a serious emergency, governors in border states would be all over the media, they are not.
The emergency and humanitarian crisis is one created by Trump and his DHS. Kids in cages, family separation--that is the emergency and crisis.
6 persons on a watch list is not an emergency. Drugs don't come in via people trying to get into this country for a better life. A DEA report clearly states that most drugs come into this country at legal ports of entry.
I'm disgusted that networks gave him airtime to spit out his racist, fearmongering lies.
Why are opioid addictions/deaths suddenly an emergency that something needs to be done about?
Long time coming?
And trump had 2 years to do something about it
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