Robert Reich
On Thursday, congressional Republicans will introduce a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. They're not doing this because they think it will be enacted (it doesn't stand a chance in the Senate, and Obama would veto it anyway). They're doing it to perpetuate their biggest lie: that the federal budget deficit is responsible for the still-anemic recovery. That's the lie they'll continue to tell over the next 7 weeks as they drag the nation through another set of showdowns over sequestration (the fiscal cliff on March 1), continuing resolutions to fund the government (running out later in March), and the debt limit (end of March).
The opposite is true: Continued cutbacks in government spending, and tax increases on the middle class and working poor (such as the Social Security tax increase at the start of January, as well as sales-tax increases in 16 states), are robbing the economy of the demand it needs when consumers are still unable to provide it.
Republicans have been telling the Big Lie that the budget deficit is to blame for our economic problems for more than two decades -- even though Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were far more responsible for running up the tab than either Bill Clinton (under whose administration the budget was finally balanced and put into surplus) or Barack Obama (who inherited a fiscal mess and has now got the deficit down to 5.3 percent of GDP).
They want the public to believe the Big Lie because it fits in with their hate-the-government ideology, and enables them to whittle it down, especially programs the middle class and working poor depend on -- including the two programs they've despised more than any others because they're so popular: Medicare and Social Security. President Obama mustn't let them. We mustn't let them.
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