Ezra Klein's morning Wonkbook contains an inacuracy: "As Republican leaders urge a steep and swift reduction in government spending..."
Haven't you guys figured out that this has nothing, I repeat, nothing, to do with government spending and everything to do with passing their agenda which is to undermine government, undermine regulations and to give free reign to corporations and the rich. If they can do it under the cover of "deficit reduction" so much the better but as we saw when they were in the majority in both houses of congress and had the White House was well, paying their bills isn't something they're especially good at.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum strikes a similar chord:
Republicans didn't care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn't care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn't care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It's a political tactic — and a good one! — not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly not a domestic spending problem. It wasn't a problem at all until 2001, and after that it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear. In the meantime, grinding unemployment in the United States is really a wee bit more important than continuing to humor Republican political posturing.
