Bob Herbert says Republicans Addicted to Tax Cuts Need Rehab
I’ve been watching Republican congressmen on TV talking about how they can’t vote for the Democrats’ stimulus plan because there’s too much spending and not enough tax cuts. I stare at my TV with incredulity and wonder if they are certifiably insane.
Republicans are now the minority party, and in a big way: 59-41 in the Senate and 251 – 173 in the House.
Why did they lose so badly? BECAUSE THEIR ECONOMIC POLICIES DON’T WORK!
I was going to write a lengthy post about their failed polices that give billions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest one percent, and do nothing to raise the incomes and improve the standard of living for the middle and lower classes. Then I read Bob Herbert today, and found he already wrote pretty much all I was going to say. So read Bob Herbert.
What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?
The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.
“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”
If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.
Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”
The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.
The Republican answer to this turmoil?
Tax cuts.
They need to go into rehab.
Read the rest of the column here.