Media and Democrats Spin to Blame the Tea Party for the Downgrade
Posted by Dana Loesch
Big Journalism
Aug 8th 2011 at 10:04 am
http://bigjournalism.com/dloesch/2011/08/08/media-and-democrats-spin-to-blame-the-tea-party-for-the-downgrade/
Since America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history under President Obama, Democrats and their media structure have been working overtime to spin this as the tea party’s fault. They’re spinning so hard they’re absolutely dizzy.
John Kerry: “Blame the tea party!”
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David Axelrod: “Blame the tea party!”
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Then there are those who blame everything and everyone other than the party in charge.
Cokie Roberts blames the Constitution:
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Barney Frank blames the military:
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The White House said that S&P made a “mathematical error” (they downgraded the downgrade) even though S&P says it is irrelevant, the downgrade stands.
Except that military spending is only 4% of GDP. Mark Steyn notes in his latest book (which is a must-get) After America, in ten years we “will be spending more of our federal budget on interest payments than on the military” – and “according to the CBO’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest.” Steyn notes that “America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined.“ Frank is careful not to mention Libya when talking about war funding; he mentions only Iraq (which is ending) and Afghanistan (which his party extended and pledged more troops) because by reminding viewers that we lumbered into conflict with a country that posed no immediate threat to our interests, he’d be showcasing Democratic irony.
Blaming the tea party (or the military, or anything else) is asinine and an outright lie and I said exactly this on CNN this morning. Let’s review.
Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period [2006 to 2010. B.] when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther.
There was one bipartisan plan that cut the $4 trillion requested by S&P to avoid a downgrade — and met the bipartisan requirement to prevent the cuts from being revoked later in party politics: that plan was the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan:
S&P said that unless an agreement is reached that results in a fiscal consolidation plan of at least $4 trillion, that the nation’s debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will continue to increase over the next decade.
And, critically, according to the report, “We view an inability to timely agree and credibly implement medium-term fiscal consolidation policy as inconsistent with a ‘AAA’ sovereign rating, given the expected government debt trajectory noted above.”
S&P measures debt owned by the public at nearly 75 percent of GDP, rising to 84 percent by 2013. But, if one counts debt owed to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the picture looks even worse.
Under that metric, total debt-to-GDP is already at 95 percent, and will likely top 100 percent within a year.
This makes an upcoming vote on Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives critical to restoring order to the nation’s fiscal house. Then, members will be voting on the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act.”
The legislation increases the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling, conditioned on hundreds of billions of immediate spending cuts, capping spending at 18 percent of GDP, and a Balanced Budget Amendment being sent to the states by both houses of Congress.
Because it includes a constitutional amendment, it may be the only proposal that would meet S&P’s criteria of an agreement that “would be enacted and maintained throughout the decade,” resulting in S&P reaffirming the nation’s Triple-A credit rating.
S&P already vindicated the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan — and because the tea party supported CCB, the tea party was already vindicated as well.
Earlier today I wrote:
So which is it? Either Democrats are so incompetent that they allowed what they define as a “small fringe of terrorists” to overpower them when they controlled the three branches of government or Democrats are so incompetent that their reckless policies contributed to the mainstreaming of the tea party movement and the repositioning of the GOP as being somewhat fiscally responsible? Only the party of President Downgrade could screw up the golden opportunity of a total congressional majority. Their base will be facepalming all the way to the ballot box if they’re not entirely demoralized by then.
I want Democrats to explain how their refusal in the Senate and White House to allow a truly bipartisan bill that met all the requirements needed to stave off a downgrade, a bill that was supported by the tea party is the fault of the tea party. I want Democrats to explain how the downgrade can be the fault of the tea party while they simultaneously blame mathematical errors, the military, Bush, Palin, El Nino, the Brothers Koch, and whatever else they can think of between now and 2012. I want Democrats to explain to their base, since they’re blaming the tea party, how the tea party has prevented them from introducing a budget in over 800 days, from introducing a bipartisan, S&P supported plan. I want them to explain how they jacked around for two years and did nothing yet it’s the tea party’s fault. And when they’ve run out of wet noodles to throw at the wall in an effort to see what witless, defamatory excuse sticks, I want them to explain to Americans how we are better off under President Downgrade than we were three years ago.
I’m waiting.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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